Any Port in a Storm
by Farmerbob1
Summary: Fubuki and Kongo left their island base to test Kongo's boilers post-maintenance. After a freak storm, they find themselves on the other side of the world. In a completely different dimension. The people of this world have no idea what an Abyssal is, and keep trying to call them 'capes.' Will our lost shipgirls find a way out of post-golden-morning Worm?
1. Chapter 1

I do not have legal rights to any of the characters in this fanfic, I'm playing in other peoples' sandboxes.

This fanfic was originally written on the Sufficient Velocity forums. My handle there is the same as here, Farmerbob1.

* * *

"We're almost to shore, Fubuki, just a little further."

 _I know that voice? Who? Oh. Kongo. She's towing me._

I tried to reply, but all that came out was "Mmff." Shaking my arm, I tried to make her let me go, and the effort woke me up. "Let me drift. You get to shore, refuel, and then come back. If you run out of fuel, we're both stuck."

Kongo's hand tightened a bit and my efforts were useless. "Oh no, you don't. I'm not going anywhere without my escort, Special Destroyer Fubuki. I've got twice your cruising range, and you aren't that hard to tow. Besides, we're close to shore. See the tall buildings? Not much further now."

I nodded, and tried to concentrate on keeping myself on an even keel so I'd be easier to tow. I wasn't in any condition to be making decisions. "How did this happen, Kongo? How did we get here? Where is here?"

"I still don't know, Fubuki. We'll find out soon."

"Sorry, Kongo, I'm loopy from lack of fuel." I tried to think back, for any clues, but there wasn't anything I could remember to explain it. Kongo had just had her boilers serviced, and needed to test them. The Admiral had asked me to accompany her, and I'd gladly agreed. Then there was a strange storm, out of nowhere. The squall was so fierce, with clouds and rain so dense that we collided as we tried to keep station with one another. Kongo, of course, was barely scratched. I bruised up pretty badly, but nothing broken.

Kongo's head swiveled and she changed heading slightly. For a moment I couldn't see why, but then my attention was drawn by a small ship approaching. I could see human men and women on deck. It was a strange, sleek looking ship, white with a red stripe, but not a hospital ship - it was armed. I could identify only the smallest of weapons, .50 caliber machine guns, dual barrel, fore and aft, but hospital ships were never armed.

"Looks like we have human company, Fubuki. Patrol craft, maybe a hundred long tons. They are approaching head-on, possibly to render assistance?" Kongo's voice sounded worried.

"Leave me if you have to, Kongo." I whispered.

"No. Even if they are aggressive, they are nothing to me, and would be hard pressed to scratch you. They don't even appear to have torpedo tubes." Kongo shook my arm a little. "Maybe we can get a bit of fuel for you, eh?"

The mention of fuel made my stomach growl so loudly, I could feel my face burning in embarrassment. Kongo laughed. "We'll get those boilers stoked soon, Fubuki, don't you fret."

I hoped she was right. Nobody had been responding to our radio codes, and I didn't recognize the shape of the approaching patrol craft.

The human-crewed vessel passed us to our port, and turned sharply to come around behind us. In a couple minutes, they matched speed with us and a human shouted loudly across the water. In English.

I didn't speak English at the time. Kongo did. She had been built in England, so she started talking to them.

Then I noticed the flag. A United States flag. A quick compass check and I verified that we were travelling west, towards shore. We'd been travelling west for a very long time. Somehow we were off the east coast of the United States?

"Kongo." I whispered. "We're off the east coast of the United States. Atlantic ocean."

"What? How?" Kongo patted her stomach with a quizzical look on her face, and then looked confused. "I don't have the range for that, without going through the Panama-" She stopped abruptly. "Later. We'll deal with that later. First we need to get you into port."

I couldn't imagine how we'd somehow managed to travel halfway around the globe. I certainly didn't have the cruising range for that. Kongo barely did, even going through the Panama Canal, and her endurance would be sharply reduced by needing to tow me the last several hundred kilometers. She was certainly low on fuel because she hadn't been topped off for the boiler test, but she wasn't acting like she was as low as she should have been after such a long voyage. She would be far more worried.

There was a great deal of talk back and forth between Kongo and the humans on their ship. I heard our names mentioned several times. Eventually, Kongo brought us alongside the little ship.

"They keep calling us capes, and have never heard of shipgirls. They want to hoist us up onboard to take us into port."

That got my attention. "They want to _what?_ " I stared at the tiny little human ship.

Kongo laughed loudly, and drew me into a hug so tight I could barely breathe. "Who knows, maybe they can. That vessel looks pretty advanced, even though it's clearly only a patrol or pilot boat of some sort." She released me from the hug.

"If they can lift you, I'll let them try to lift me." She grinned. "I hope they can. I've never been lifted into the air before! Zeppelin Battleship Kongo, they'll call me! I'll offer to take the Admiral for a ride!" She waggled her eyebrows at me and we both burst into laughter.

With Kongo's help, I pulled up right underneath a small cargo hoist.

 _There's no way this is going to work. That's a light hoist. No more than a couple tons._

I hadn't understood the conversation between the humans and Kongo, so I asked her directly. "You told them we weigh more than humans, right?"

"Fubuki, a lady does not discuss her weight. Especially with men." Kongo smiled at me. "They insisted they wanted to take us onboard, so we'll let them try."

 _This is going to end badly if I'm not very careful. How do these people not know anything about shipgirls? We've been fighting the Abyssals for years._

A light cable with a harness meant for a human to wear dipped down towards the water, and I carefully grabbed it, making absolutely certain to grip it loosely and put no weight on it. "Kongo, tell them I'm about to test the cable."

Kongo and the humans on ship talked. The humans clearly looked and sounded confused. Eventually Kongo spoke sharply and the humans all backed away from the rail, going either far aft or forward, or into the ship itself.

"They definitely have no idea what a shipgirl is. I eventually had to tell them we wouldn't try to come aboard until they got out of reach of the cable."

 _This cable is only a couple centimeters in diameter. No way this is working._

I tugged on the cable lightly. Everything seemed stable, so I put some weight on it. I'd barely displaced myself in the water before the cable snapped, the whip ends striking me and the human ship with loud cracks of impact. There was a lot of yelling from the crew.

I wiped my cheek where the cable had struck me. My makeup was probably a mess already, but that cable had surely left a mark in my foundation. I scowled.

The humans and Kongo were yelling back and forth, and not all of the words sounded polite at first. Eventually, a basket was lowered to us on a rope, with sandwiches in it.

I have no idea what kind of sandwiches they were. I was so ravenous that there was no such thing as taste. Kongo did manage to grab one sandwich half. I didn't say anything. She was surely hungry too, and she had been towing me.

The humans on ship were pointing little boxes at us, like they were cameras. But they didn't look like cameras. I heard a word that I knew. Piranha. Looking into the basket, which was now empty, I looked back up at them and rubbed my stomach, and gave them a slight, polite bow. "Domo arigato."

They all laughed like I'd said something very funny. One of them, with bar insignias on his shoulder indicating that he was a low ranking officer seemed to be reading something off the back of his camera, and said "Anata wa, fubuki kangei sa rete imasu." Very formal, and horribly pronounced, but I understood it, and nodded, acknowledging his politeness.

 _A camera with a notebook of language phrases on the back of it. That's pretty clever._

 _But how did he know he would need Japanese today?_

Kongo and the officer, a lieutenant, spoke a little longer. The sandwiches had really been helpful. I had energy again, enough to go at least ten kilometers. I kept station next to Kongo and the little human ship while they talked.

There weren't any more loud words, fortunately. The humans apparently recognized that we only looked human. What had Kongo said they tried to call us? Capes? I couldn't see how 'cape' might be equivalent to 'shipgirl', assuming that Kongo translated it right.

I stopped, and stared, before asking. "Kongo, how good is your English, really? You were built in England, but you didn't stay there long."

She sniffed at me. "I speak perfect English, don't you worry."

I worried.

"So, ah, what are they saying?"

"Something about being met at the docks by a Dragon, but we have to be careful about another dragon. They use the English word for one of them, but the Chinese word Lung for the other. They seem to be talking about two different people."

I worried some more. "Well, lung dragons are supposed to be benevolent, mostly, right? Which dragon are we supposed to careful about, again?"

Kongo looked confused, and spoke to the humans again, then relayed the information to me. "We avoid the male human Lung dragon. The female Dragon in armor is the Dragon we need to talk to." There was more conversation. "This ship is apparently based north of here a few miles in a marina. Since we aren't in distress any longer, they aren't allowed to take us to their base. They call themselves the Coast Guard, but most of what they do is anti-smuggling and search and rescue. They are not at war, and have never heard of Abyssals, but they did say something about a Leviathan that was very dangerous. The officer says Leviathan is dead. One of the senior NCO's isn't sure."

"I hope we can find someone who speaks Japanese." I muttered as Kongo turned to the humans on the ship and waved hugely.

As she waved, there was a tremendous growling noise from Kongo's direction. Loud enough that I saw several of the humans looking around nervously, scanning the horizon, clearly looking for squalls. I knew what that sound was.

 _If I start calling her 'thunder-belly' she'll drag me to shore by my ankles. I know it.  
_  
I resisted the temptation.

Kongo's face turned bright red, and she started moving quickly towards the docks, which were barely visible. Radar was showing me returns that promised something more like a breaker's yard than docks. Even from about three kilometers offshore, I could see ships that had obviously settled to the bottom of the bay, tilted to the side like no floating ship would unless severely damaged and taking on water.

I dashed ahead of Kongo to take station in front of her like a proper line-ahead escort. "They aren't in a war now, but I wonder if they have fought a war recently, Kongo. Did they say anything about a recent war? Those look like scuttled ships in the shallows."

"They did not say, but if they are allowing strange warships to simply enter their city perimeter where we might bombard their civilians, they aren't at war, and probably haven't been recently." Kongo sounded confident. Her logic seemed solid to me.

I worried about that more and more as we approached the docks. They were in terrible condition. As shipgirls, we didn't need to moor like human ships, but we needed to be close to water. We were quite a bit less powerful onshore, because our rigs only worked in the water.

Kongo was muttering about how terrible the docks looked by the time we reached shore. There were no large vessels present that looked like they were seaworthy. Something was strange.

A large human man was waiting for us at the docks. He had a lot of other men around him, behind him to his flanks. Not knowing what to expect, Kongo and I stayed in the water, barely offshore.

The man spoke politely, in Japanese, while looking mostly at Kongo. "Hello ladies. It has been a long time since I have seen traditional Japanese clothing worn properly. Though I must also admit I've never seen them worn with such heavy-looking battle armor and guns." He paused, thinking. "Please excuse my behavior. My name is Lung. These are my employees."

I wasn't an expert on humans, but the men behind Lung did not look like refined individuals. They were dirty, and carrying weapons. Their eyes had the look of violence. Lung was cleaner, bigger, better dressed, but he still carried himself like a fighter, a hard man. His eyes flickered over us, hungrily.

Kongo spoke slowly. "I am Kongo." She pointed to me. "This is Fubuki. We were advised to avoid a man named Lung. Please stand aside. We are waiting for an armored woman named Dragon to arrive. We want no conflict."

"These are my docks. If you want no conflict, then you will join my organization, and when Dragon arrives you will tell her to leave." It wasn't a suggestion, it was a command.

 _This won't end well if he keeps that up._

"You are not our admiral, Lung." Kongo's voice grew very serious. No nonsense. "I will not take orders from you. We will wait for the one named Dragon. Leave us. I do not wish to harm you."

Realizing that I should have taken over the conversation before Kongo had gone too far, I slapped my forehead, and everyone stared at me, briefly, as my face turned bright red.

 _Battleships don't do subtle._

I grabbed Kongo's arm and tugged at it, hard, barely budging her. "Kongo, please no. We just got here. If you accidentally hurt people here, they might not let us provision ourselves."

There was a strange orange glow from Lung's eyes, and the men behind him backed up. "Kongo is an odd name for a woman." His eyes never left Kongo. "The little one seems to be saying that you have experience fighting. While I normally don't let ABB females fight, I will make exceptions for capes. Would you care to show your prowess?"

Both of us simply stared at him. We knew what we looked like to humans. Without our rigs, we could pass for human as long as nobody tried to move us against our will, or attack us. With our rigs, we were very daunting. No human would dare attack even a frigate like me, and this Lung human was asking for a fight, with a _battleship_ shipgirl? I checked myself and Kongo again. Our rigs hadn't mysteriously disappeared.

Kongo shook her head angrily. "I do not fight humans. You are too weak. Even if I were to try to be gentle, I might kill you by accident. Leave us."

"I am not human. I am Lung. You will join my organization, or I will make certain you cannot join my enemies." He and Kongo locked eyes, and I could see Kongo's eyes narrow as he continued. "You are Japanese. You are confident in your strength. I would be happy to have you in my all-Asian organization. Not as whores, if that is what concerns you. Provided, of course, that you really are capes."

As he finished speaking, he smiled, an animal's grin, with teeth showing. I definitely saw fire coming from his mouth, and the teeth were more pointed than human teeth normally were.

"You say you aren't human?" Kongo asked. "You look human. You don't seem to be able to talk by radio-"

Lung interrupted, looking startled. "You are Japanese, and you do not know me? I am THE Lung."

I looked at Kongo and she looked at me, clearly confused. "Fubuki, have you ever heard of a man named Lung?"

Shaking my head, I responded while keeping my eyes on Lung. "I've heard of a few men with that name, Kongo, but none of them ever did anything particularly noteworthy off the top of my head."

When I said that, Lung seemed to puff up like a balloon. His clothing ripped in several places, and his face grew strangely shiny, like fish scales.

"Enough. I will not be insulted like this any longer." He pointed at Kongo. "You dare to call yourself 'Indestructable'? Then you come here to my docks, insult me in front of my people, and pretend you don't know who I am? I am no longer offering you a place in my organization."

Lung seemed to be getting larger in front of my eyes. He ran forward, and struck far faster than a man his size should be able to move. His body was hot enough that when he stepped into the water, steam billowed.

 _Definitely not human. What is he? A cape? Are capes Dragon-people?_

Kongo didn't have a chance to react before he struck her in the face, with a resounding concussive force that actually moved air around us.

A spray of water and steam hid Kongo and Lung from me, briefly, as I quickly backed away. I stayed close enough to support her if it somehow became necessary, but the first rule of escorting battleships is: NEVER get between a battleship and her target.

As a misting of falling water drifted through the steam, clearing the air, Kongo became visible walking towards the beach, dragging Lung by his neck through the surf. "I said I didn't want a fight. Fortunately I haven't found one." When she reached the sand, and stepped out of the water, her rig disappeared.

Lung was tearing at Kongo's arms with what appeared to be claws, trying to free himself. It wasn't even scratching her kimono. She tried to set him back on his feet, but he was too tall now, and getting larger, quickly, so she threw him away from her onto the sand.

"I don't want to hurt you, or have you hurt yourself, Lung. Stop. I'll tell other people that I actually felt that, if it makes you feel any better and preserves your dignity."

The look that Lung gave us from where he landed on the sand was pure rage.

I shook my head. There wasn't anything else I could do. I wasn't pulling Kongo out of this if the Lung man didn't back down. Still, I had to say something, even though it was pretty much useless. "Kongo. They don't know what we are, remember? He thinks you're human."

Without taking her eyes off Lung, Kongo crossed her arms, and scowled. "Oh, bother. Does that mean you're really going to attack me again, not-a-human?" She paused and smirked. "I'm not in my rig any longer."

Lung said nothing, but _blew fire_ at us. It wasn't a lot, and it really wasn't _that_ hot, but some of my hair and the edges of my kimono caught fire. I quickly splashed water on myself, but didn't take my eyes off Kongo, who had moved between Lung and me to block the fire. Her kimono wasn't even singing.

"You seem to be able to turn into a dragon, Lung. I admit that it's very interesting, but I'm not impressed." She glanced back at me, and squinted a little. "However, you've done some damage to my escort with your fire." She snapped back to face him and started walking forward into his fire. "If you don't leave us now, you will get hurt. Though I'll try not to kill you by accident, I can't guarantee your life."

As she walked closer to Lung, Kongo cracked her knuckles and rolled her shoulders before crooking her finger in his direction. "If you really insist on doing this, let's get it over with. I'm hungry."

Lung stopped breathing fire and charged her again, with even more speed than before. He was at least fifteen feet long now, a cross between a man and a dragon. This time, he slammed his shoulder into Kongo's stomach, clearly trying to knock her down.

I heard bones break, and winced. I didn't much like this Lung person, and they were certainly the one responsible for the fight, but senseless violence and injuries were, well, senseless.

As Lung bounced off Kongo's midsection, she chuckled. "I won't have to lie when I tell people I felt that one." She leaned over and grabbed one of his ankles while he was still shaking his head. "It seems as if you might get stronger the longer you fight. I'll remember that. You remember this. If you attack me or Fubuki again, there won't be a third fight. You've got a long way to go before you're strong enough to hurt me."

Lung's body was still reshaping itself from human to dragon, quickly growing larger, and the oddly-shaped broken shoulder no longer appeared broken.

"If you say that you yield, I will stop." Kongo commented as she dragged Lung into a wide-open section of beach, ignoring him as he clawed at her. She then used her grip on his leg to start slamming him back and forth on the beach like a club, beating him into the sand progressively harder until he finally stopped moving. By the time that happened, I could barely see for all the sand and dust in the air. I had to give the Lung-credit, he never yielded or stopped fighting until he was unconscious.

I stepped out of the water, and walked up next to Kongo, both of us looking at Lung's body. He was still breathing, and I could see that he was getting smaller. Several obviously broken bones reshaped themselves under his skin.

 _I would LOVE to be able to heal that quickly!_

A female voice suddenly spoke, startling both of us. "I don't believe I've ever seen anyone handle Lung quite so... casually, before."

Kongo, who had been looking at her blistered hands with annoyance, snapped her head towards the new speaker like it was one of her turrets. "Are you also going to insist on fighting me? I didn't even make it to shore before this clown insisted on having me make a fool of him. Some human ports are bad for human sailors fighting, but this is ridiculous."

I was staring, with my mouth open. The woman speaking was wearing the most incredibly complex armor I'd ever seen.

"I am Dragon. I have no interest in fighting you, if you are Kongo and Fubuki. The captain of the Mako said you were coming to the docks, and said that one of you only spoke Japanese?"

I realized then, that she was speaking near-perfect Japanese, but very formally. When I realized I was blatantly staring with my mouth open, I snapped my mouth shut, and I felt my face getting red at my own rudeness to stare like that.

Kongo wasn't in a good mood, and snapped out a reply in a tone that wasn't very friendly, even though none of the words were offensive. "We are. The crew of the Mako were polite and helpful. We're sorry about the winch cable, but nobody was hurt. They've apparently never dealt with shipgirls before. This is getting more frustrating with every passing minute."

"Shipgirls, you say?" The woman in the suit commented after a couple seconds. "I've never heard of shipgirls either, but I have heard of the ships Kongo and Fubuki. Is there a connection?"

"We are the spirits of those ships, Dragon." I offered, tentatively.

Kongo looked at me and nodded, clearly wanting me to handle the conversation. She knew she was in a bad mood, and she was staring at the blisters on her hands. As she saw me nod back, she turned her back on Dragon and walked to the water to cool her hands.

 _Lung must have been extremely hot to burn Kongo at all._

Dragon, after a couple seconds, continued. "I don't understand. You two triggered and somehow became the personification of old World War 2 Japanese warships?"

"Old?" I looked at her sharply. "I am _not_ old, and neither is Kongo. We are the spirits of the ships, not the ships themselves. We do not age like humans." I scratched my ear. "What do you mean by triggered?"

Dragon held out her two hands, palm up, and bowed slightly. "I did not intend to offend. Triggering is what happens to make humans into capes, and both of those ships sank in-."

I shot her another glare. "We know when we sank, and we don't want to talk about it. It brings back memories." Realizing that I was beginning to lose my temper with someone who didn't know better, I raised my hands and then bowed slightly back. "I apologize. Talking about our sinking is not something a shipgirl will do, typically, unless it was a voluntary scuttling and no crew went down with them."

"I see. Like triggers then. Most capes don't like to talk about their triggers."

"Really? Wow." I looked at the unconscious Lung, and connections were formed. "So he was human at one time? I've never heard of anything like that."

Dragon chuckled. "Yes, he was. He still is. Mostly." She paused. "I would like to offer you two a place to stay, at least until you learn a little bit about this world. It's pretty clear that you come from one of the more distant dimensions. We can work to try to send you back, if you like, but it may take some time. Scion broke things pretty badly, just about everywhere."

I nodded firmly. "We're needed back home. Though I've never heard of a Scion."

Dragon stared at me. "A very remote dimension then." Her head turned slightly. "Well, I see the PRT is here. They will take care of Lung, at least until he manages to escape again." The mechanical suit gestured to where several trucks had arrived, and I saw men and women sprinting across the sand until they reached Lung and started spraying him with white foam.

Kongo stepped up beside me. "We would greatly appreciate a refueling and facilities to repair the minor damage we've sustained." She glared at Lung.

"From the sensor readings I'm getting from you two, I'm not sure we can heal you. We'll try, but we can certainly help with resupply if you don't need anything exotic. Taking down Lung is good enough to get you a lot of favors." She stared at us for another few seconds, then shook her head. If we just get you raw materials, can you heal yourselves?"

I nodded. "Slowly, but we can repair minor damage to ourselves over time with rest and resupply. It's a little like human healing. I'm sure you don't have any instant repairs."

The woman in the fantastic suit of armor asked "So, what supplies do you need first?"

Kongo's stomach growled again, even more loudly than when it had happened next to the little human ship offshore. Dragon stared at the two of us, specifically at Kongo. The men and women spraying foam on Lung looked up and around, muttering about thunder.

"If that was what I think it was, I'm guessing food is at the top of the list?" She paused. "The captain of the Mako said they gave you two thirty sandwiches."

I blushed. "They gave us a lot of sandwiches, but I was out of fuel, so Kongo let me eat them."

"You ate thirty sandwiches? By yourself?" The woman sounded more curious than shocked.

Grinning at her, I replied. "Now I know it's true. You definitely don't know about shipgirls."

Kongo rubbed her stomach. "I could really use a meal. I'm below ten percent. I haven't been this low in years."

* * *

Six hours later.

* * *

"You two are fascinating. Where is all that food going? You've eaten three buffet restaurants out of stock."

I blushed, and had to give her a compliment back. "You're pretty fascinating too! That armor was really interesting when I thought it was a person inside, but it's even more incredible that you're far away and controlling the suit by radio. Can you show me how to do that with torpedoes, maybe?"

Dragon smiled at me. "Maybe. We'll have to see how your rigs work, if we can understand them. We can't understand most tinker tech well enough to copy it." After a brief pause she continued. "Well, you aren't tinkers, so maybe it will work anyway.

"Well, going back to your question about the food, we don't know, really." Kongo muttered as she set her forty-first refill plate down on the table. I was only on my seventh. "We're a lot more massive than humans our size."

I nodded and added a little. "If we don't move under our own power, it's hard for humans to move us at all. Kongo can carry me around if she has to, but I can barely budge her if she can't move. I tried to move Yamato once, by myself. I almost blew my engines. She's never said how much she masses."

With a chuckle, Dragon spoke in a low tone. "I could tell. The way Lung stopped when he hit you, and then when you were beating the stuffing out of him. You weren't using any of the tricks that extremely strong capes normally use for leverage, just whacking him back and forth on the sand like you were playing a giant game of Whack-a-mole. Colin is going to enjoy that video so much." She paused. "Lung really can get much stronger than that, by the way. You knocked him out when he was still small and weak. Don't get overconfident."

Kongo looked up. "I told him already. I will not start a fight, but if he attacks us again, I will treat him like a true enemy. There won't be a third fight if there's ever a second. He's nowhere near my weight class, at least at first." She looked at the blisters on her hands, and scowled.

Dragon nodded. The machine that she called a 'remote' was so amazingly fantastic, I could barely stop staring at it whenever it did something so human. "If you don't mind me asking, between us ladies, ah, how much do you weigh? I really do need to know this, so we know what sort of facilities we can safely use to house you."

Kongo shook her head. "As long as we move ourselves, there's no problem. We move our own mass like we were human. I'm sitting in this wooden chair now, see? I have no idea how it works, but it does."

Dragon shifted a little, uncomfortably. "If one of you is injured and the other is not available to help move you? We need to know how we can move you."

What she was asking made sense, and I knew Kongo would be stubborn about it if I didn't lead off. "Less than two-point-one million kilos." I whispered in a very low tone so nobody other than Kongo and Dragon could hear.

Dragon stared at me, briefly, then turned to Kongo, expectantly.

Kongo looked at me, irritated, then cupped her hands around the sides of her mouth and pointed her mouth at Dragon, carefully whispering, in a low tone. "Less than thirty-eight million kilos." She waggled her finger under Dragon's mechanical nose. "That's with full provisions and munitions mind you! I've never been over thirty-eight million kilos. Never."


	2. Chapter 2

I scratched my ear as Defiant finished a sentence. A moment later, I heard what he had said in English, translated to Japanese. "Kongo, Fubuki, what you did to Lung was, frankly, amazing. There are other parahumans that can fight him when he's weaker, but not many." He paused. "Dragon also explained that between the two of you, you ate nearly a thousand kilos of food in a period of eight hours. While your abilities would certainly allow for you to eventually find a way to earn an income to pay for your food, at least, the PRT will happily cover your needs if you agree to work with us."

The little ear insert itched like mad. Dragon had provided me with the tiny device that translated languages. It was smaller than the last joint of my smallest finger, and fitted in my left ear like an earplug. Kongo spoke English, and didn't need one. Of course, she and I both wanted to know how it worked. It almost seemed like magic that something so small could do so much. Dragon kindly pointed out to us that our knowledge of electronics was insufficient to even begin understanding the technologies in the device, and it wasn't even what humans called tinker tech. She did indicate that electronics technology wasn't restricted, and we could go to school to learn about it if we stayed in this dimension for a long time.

 _I wish Dragon had been able to stay._

I started to speak, but Kongo raised a finger and gave me a serious look. I nodded back and relaxed back into my chair to listen.

Kongo nodded to me. "Thank you, Fubuki. I suspect you were about to say what I want to say, but I am the one who has already fought here, once."

She was senior to me, even if she normally let me talk when serious things were being discussed.

After she saw me lean back, Kongo turned to Defiant. "Dragon also said there aren't any Abyssals on this world. That all conflict is between humans. Shipgirls will _not_ fight humans by choice. If pressed, we will fight, as you saw when Lung refused to leave us alone. I can even imagine scenarios where I might kill humans, if a greater number of humans are being threatened, or if we encounter humans that are clearly insane, and a threat."

Defiant's face showed obvious dissatisfaction. "We have noncombat roles, if those are the only roles you are willing to fill while we try to help you get home. You certainly have the strength and durability to be extremely useful for tearing down damaged buildings and earth moving, and there's a lot of that work to be done." He sighed. "I understand if you have seen enough of war, and prefer peace. You certainly aren't alone in that."

Kongo's face lost all expression, and her voice went toneless. "You do _not_ understand. War is perfectly acceptable. Fubuki and I are shipgirls. Warship shipgirls. There is no place we feel more at home than a battle at sea, and I know of no warship shipgirl that does not look forward to battle against Abyssals."

Defiant's face softened slightly. "But not against humans."

Leaning forward abruptly enough that she made Defiant jerk back a bit, Kongo replied. "Exactly. As a ship, I killed many enemies of my crew, both during shore bombardments and naval ship-to-ship action. I also remember 1200 of my crew dying onboard when one of my forward magazines exploded shortly before I sank." She tapped the table between herself and Defiant. "As a shipgirl, I fight to preserve human life." There was a brief pause, and when she continued speaking, her voice was lower, rough with emotion. "Many shipgirls believe that we are being given an opportunity to balance the scales, to redeem ourselves for the misery and destruction we helped humans visit on one another."

I put my left hand on Kongo's right arm, not in restraint, but to offer comfort. No shipgirl liked to talk about her sinking or the humans we killed in our first incarnations, but this conversation was too important to avoid.

It was clear that we were being offered a place, at least temporarily, but we needed to make sure that what they thought they would get from us matched what we were willing to give. Anything else would be a bad faith arrangement, and we needed help to get back home.

Kongo's left hand settled gently on my right, with a careful squeeze. We looked at each other sadly, both of us remembering the deaths we had been responsible for.

After a few seconds, I gently asked. "The past is the past, Kongo. Do you want me to continue from here?"

"That might be for the best, Fubuki." She nodded at Defiant. "I hope I didn't worry you."

The man was silent for several seconds as he thought, tracing his fingers absently into the holes Kongo had poked into the table with her fingernails. "Stainless steel table, a quarter inch thick." He looked at her right hand, which was stretched out in front of her. "And you poked holes through it without even chipping a nail." He stared at her. "It was intentional?"

"It was. Just to make a point. About how easily I can hurt people." Kongo met Defiant's gaze until he looked away.

"Good. I thought it was." He took a deep breath. "You aren't the only ones who feel that way. I'll introduce you to Riley in a few days, perhaps, if you decide to stay with us, and after we get some testing done to determine what you can do."

I nodded, and Defiant's gaze turned to me directly. Dragon was entirely mechanical, and was very interesting. Defiant appeared to be mostly human, but part machine. His mixture of man and machine bothered me to no small degree. But this conversation needed to happen.

"I doubt that you have facilities to properly test Kongo and me." I responded, doubtfully.

"We might surprise you. There are many very powerful capes in the world."

"We aren't capes, Defiant." I paused, considering. "We will not utilize munitions until we determine that you are able to replace them." I nodded at Kongo. "Her main guns fire 356mm rounds, and we need real, full-sized munitions in our possession to reload. Dragon said human industrial capacity was damaged severely by Scion, and tooling up for creating significant numbers of rounds will surely be very time consuming and expensive."

Defiant's mouth twitched in a bit of a smile. "You underestimate what Dragon and I might do to meet your needs, but we can start with simple strength and endurance tests if you like?"

I looked at Kongo and she gave me a sly grin. "We'll to the same thing we did with the Mako's hoist, Fubuki. If you can be tested on their equipment, then I'll allow them to test me." She tilted her head and glanced at Defiant with a serious face. "I will watch the testing. This is not negotiable."

He nodded, accepting the condition. "I would prefer that, Kongo. We don't have equipment built yet that will allow us to transport Fubuki if she grows too weary to move."

 _This is funny, the way they just don't quite understand._

Kongo and I looked at each other and grinned. Human misconceptions of shipgirls were fairly good humor fodder when we went out into the world of humans on our world. On this world, it was hilarious so far. I was fully topped off on fuel. I doubted that these tests were going to take more than several days, which is how long my fuel would last, even if I ran my boilers at maximum power output.

Defiant was looking back and forth at us. "OK, what did I just step in? I know I said something that you two found funny."

I reassured him with a friendly smile. "Just a misconception. You are misattributing human characteristics to shipgirls. I might get mentally tired of whatever you want me to do, but I will not grow physically weary unless the testing extends to several days without food. I have plenty of fuel."

Defiant's features went still, briefly, then he smiled. "Understood. Do you sleep?"

"We can, but we can go without for much longer than humans, if needed." I answered.

"The testing will not be in a dangerous environment, will it?" Kongo asked.

 _Good question. We still don't have a real repair facility._ I looked at Defiant and raised an eyebrow. I'd seen a human on Television make the expression, and I practiced it, because it was so perfect to express a question or doubt, without words.

Defiant looked at me, and I swore he started to smile, but then he shook his head. "The testing area is a large gymnasium with lots of specialized training equipment. It's used for regular training exercises for a lot of capes, most of them are nowhere near as durable as you are." He nodded at Kongo. "Unlike you, I haven't seen anything about Fubuki's performance yet, so we'll start off slow. Humans are a bit more fragile than you two are, most of us, so we know to warm up."

I smiled at Kongo when she looked at me. "I'll be fine, Kongo, but I'll be happy to have you there. I'm actually looking forward to it. Most of the exercises on land at the base were just for endurance, not strength. For obvious reasons."

Defiant looked at me quizzically. "I'm not following you."

I shrugged. "We didn't have any way to really test our power accurately on land. Everything breaks too easily."

He looked back and forth at the two of us. "Am I going to regret asking to test you two ladies?"

Kongo shook her head. "Fubuki is a very careful, very responsible shipgirl, Defiant. She won't break your toys."

 _I hope._

I looked at Kongo and raised one eyebrow.

She laughed at me. "You are. Both things." She waggled a finger at me. "No self-doubt allowed. I, Kongo, declare it to be true that you are careful and responsible."

Defiant was looking back and forth at the two of us, again, expressionless. "Do you have any idea how strong you are, Fubuki?"

"Sure. My yard specs are fifty thousand horsepower. I'm not sure how my gearing translates into arm and body strength."

"I... see." He paused. "Yes, I will ask that you be careful with most of the equipment."

I gave him a very serious, short bow. "I will be very careful, Defiant. I have no desire to cause damage to your training and testing equipment."

* * *

The two of us followed Defiant down several flights of stairs to the bottom of the stairwell, and then we walked into a long hallway, with lots of doors to either side. Defiant showed us the side rooms, they were medical facilities. Not operating rooms, but examination rooms, with lots of electronic equipment that I couldn't name.

As we approached the double doors at the end of the hallway, I could hear lots of clicking and clacking, people talking in encouraging tones, and some sounds that were more growls and groans of extreme effort as opposed to actual words.

Defiant pushed open the doors, and there was lots of white, chrome, and mirrors.

"It's so beautiful." I whispered.

Defiant looked at me and smiled.

 _I wonder if he built any of this equipment? Dragon said he was a tinker._

Every machine gleamed like the finest chrome, black materials covered the parts of machines which appeared to be where one might put one's body. The floor was white, and looked like marble, but I could see that the tiles were too close together to be grouted, so it couldn't be real marble. The mirrors on every wall allowed me to see myself from every angle, and gave the room an appearance of being huge.

 _Not. Breaking. Anything. It's too beautiful._

Over in the corner, two large, muscular human men wearing masks, sweaty T-shirts, and shorts were working next to each other. One was laying on a metallic raised platform, and repeatedly lifting what looked to be a train axle, with several thin train wheels on either side.

The other man was standing close, and helping the first man lift the axle. Something didn't look right. The man on his back was straining hard, and the one standing seemed tense, but was not straining. The standing man was a really poor partner if they were supposed to be sharing the load. After a few more steps following Defiant, I noticed something else about the standing man.

 _He's only holding his hands under it, he's not helping to lift._

"It's called spotting, Fubuki. One person stands ready to keep the other from being injured by falling weight. It's one of the things that people are required to do here when working with what we call free weights."

"That makes a great deal of sense." Kongo commented.

Even something like that train axle could kill a human, even after a short fall. I remembered several accidents where my human crew had been severely injured loading torpedoes, two had died. The two men in the room were far bigger than any of my crew had ever been, but that train axle with extra wheels was probably much heavier than any of my torpedoes.

With a near-scream of effort, the man on his back managed to lift the weight another few inches to the sound of the standing man's encouragement. "You've got this rep, Wildcat. No problem. Push it. Push." Another almost-scream from the man laying down, and the weight moved up again, but started to sag back down.

Kongo and I stared at the spectacle of the man screaming. It made me a little uncomfortable. He was clearly in some pain. I knew about screams of pain. The only thing keeping the sound from being unbearable was the tones of defiance and effort that could also be heard. This man wasn't a victim, he was pushing himself to his limits and wasn't willing to give up.

Defiant stopped, silent, watching us watch the two men. Finally, after about fifteen more seconds of yelling and screaming in effort, with much encouragement from the standing man, the man called 'Wildcat' managed to straighten both arms under the axle. The standing man plucked the weight out of Wildcat's hands and set it down at his own feet.

Wildcat's arms fell to his sides and thumped against the floor like noodles when the weight was removed from them. He hooked his feet under a bar at the end of the bench and levered his torso into a sitting position without using his arms at all. "What was the count, Oak?

"Two hundred six good reps, eight that weren't full extension. That was a good set."

"My arms are going to fall off. I think that's the end for today. Give me a few minutes and I'll be able to spot for you."

Kongo started clapping, and both men looked up, looking between the two of us and Defiant.

I started clapping too, it had clearly been a victory for the man exercising. An excellent effort.

Defiant didn't clap, but he did speak. "You've come a long way in a month, Wildcat. Are you starting to peak yet?"

Wildcat shrugged, and frowned a little. "I'm having a hard time consistently breaking twenty-two hundred kilos, two hundred reps. I managed it three days ago, and today, but not yesterday."

"You're still young." Oak countered. "Biology does odd things to young bodies."

Wildcat and Oak were both staring at Kongo.

 _I hope they have the common sense and decency to stop staring at her soon, or she's going to take offense. A little staring is a compliment. A lot of staring is rude._

Defiant spoke again. "I need you off the floor for a little while guys. Go hit the showers - you stink. Wouldn't want to offend the young ladies."

 _I wouldn't mind if they stared at me, briefly, before they go. Even shipgirls like to be pretty._

"Yes, sir. Will you need us out of the facility, or just inactive for a while?" The one named Oak asked.

With a chuckle, Defiant responded. "After you don't stink, you can come back and watch the testing."

As they walked away towards the opposite side of the gymn from where we entered, they didn't look at me at all. I grumbled to myself and looked down at my chest when I thought Kongo and Defiant weren't looking. Then I realized that we were surrounded by mirrors.

I caught Kongo looking at me sideways in the mirror with a little smile and my face must have turned bright red.

Defiant was either being very polite, since we didn't know each other, or hadn't noticed. I had a feeling he was being polite.

After a delay of about a second, Defiant walked over to one of the largest machines in the facility, and beckoned for us to follow him. "This is the machine that we test high rated brutes on. I don't think you can break it." He looked back and forth between the two of us as he said it.

 _Oh, no._

Looking up and to my right, I saw Kongo's eyes narrow as she looked at the machine. Before she could get too far with what I knew was going through her head, I tapped her arm. "I know what you're thinking." I paused, briefly to make sure she processed it. "Remember, we're guests."

Kongo started to blush a little in embarrassment, and bowed slightly to Defiant. "See? Careful and responsible. Fubuki is the _best_ destroyer escort!"

There was more back-and-forth looking from Defiant. "You two certainly do talk like people who've fought together."

We both nodded to him. I wasn't sure how many times we'd fought Abyssals as part of the same task group or squadron.

"Well, as for the testing machine here, I would appreciate it if you would stop putting force against the machine if you hear a siren. The siren indicates that the force applied reached its maximum safe rating." He paused. "There are no moving parts on the machine."

That didn't make any sense. "Wait. What? How do you-"

Defiant gently interrupted me. "Electronics, Fubuki. Strain gauges detect tiny deformations in the metal and calculate force. High rated brutes are too strong to allow them to use moving weights except in very controlled circumstances. If they drop something, it can kill or maim others weaker than them."

There were several more minutes of discussion about rules and how to use the machine correctly, and then Defiant asked a couple questions to make sure I actually remembered what I had been told.

I stepped onto the chrome and black machine, putting my feet on the foot-shaped marks, and my hands on the hand-shaped marks. Defiant started making adjustments on the machine to lower the front so my hands were at shoulder level, and then adjusted the position of the foot rests so I would be pushing with my body at around forty-five degrees, knees and elbows bent.

"OK, Fubuki, whenever you're ready, start pushing. Please start pushing slowly, and keep using more strength until you are pushing as hard as you can, or you hear the siren warning."

"I'm ready now, Defiant." I nodded to him, and started to push, carefully, slowly increasing the force I applied.

In the wall mirrors, I saw the two muscular humans emerge from where they had gone for their showers. They were both wearing what I'd learned were called 'jeans' and 't-shirts'.

They were also still wearing their masks. Masks were apparently very important to most 'cape' humans in this world.

Both men were staring at me, clearly curious, so I smiled at them.

The smaller one smiled at me, and the two of them talked to one another, but I couldn't hear what they said. They both laughed but kept watching me.

The machine spoke, like Defiant said it would. Every ten seconds, it would announce my estimated potential power output, averaged over the last ten seconds.

"One point three megawatts."

Both men stopped laughing and started staring.

 _That's not the kind of staring that I wanted._

I stopped looking at the men, and started pushing harder.

"Four point six megawatts."

I heard the voice of the one called Wildcat complain. "You've got to be kidding me. There's no way she's even five feet tall, and if she weighs more than seventy-five pounds, I'd be amazed."

 _Haha. More amazed than you think, I bet._

I ramped up a little more, pushing harder, being careful to keep both hands and both feet firmly planted so they didn't slip or jerk.

"Eleven point nine megawatts."

The machine seemed to be holding up fairly well.

"Seventeen point one megawatts."

There was a whistle from one of the two watching men. "Damn, will you look at that? Oak, she doesn't even seem to be pushing herself yet."

He had spoken loudly enough to hear easily, so I responded. "I'm not. I promised not to break the equipment, so I'm being careful."

Both men stared at me, wordlessly.

Defiant walked between the men and me, then turned away from me towards the men. "You can stay and watch, but please be quieter. You know better than to distract anyone in the gym." Then he turned to face me. "Please concentrate on the test, Fubuki. When you're done, you can talk?"

It was a justified rebuke. I nodded. Then I started carefully pushing harder and harder.

"Twenty-three point four megawatts."

I was pushing fairly hard, but there was plenty of power left.

"Thirty-one point nine megawatts."

It was much harder now, but I wasn't quite peaking.

"Thirty-six point five megawatts."

I was pushing as hard as I could, but my target was at least thirty-seven megawatts. I started adjusting my elbows, hips, shoulders, and knees, changing angles, trying to increase my power output with better leverage.

"Thirty-six point eight megawatts."

 _Thirty-seven megawatts, Fubuki. Anything less is unaccepable._

I forced myself to push a little harder.

The machine was taunting me. "Thirty-six point nine megawatts."

I lowered myself just a little more and tried to press even harder against the machine. I was sweating heavily, and my breath was coming in gasps. The room felt hot.

"Thirty-six point five megawatts."

 _What? No. More. Not less. Unacceptable._

I started taking huge, rapid breaths of air, and was dripping sweat. I pushed even harder.

"Thirty-two point one megawatts."

I heard Defiant's voice." You peaked, Fubuki, that was excellent. Slowly reduce force and rest. You can try again shortly, if you want."

 _Trying again means I failed the first time. No._

I shook my head. "Need thirty-seven megawatts."

Lowering myself a little more, I pushed again, quickly ramping up the force I was applying.

"Thirty-five point five megawatts."

 _Not enough._ I forced myself to breathe faster, deeper, I needed more air.

"Thirty-six point three megawatts."

I put every bit of my concentration into the effort. I was going to beat the machine.

Suddenly, I felt the ground shake slightly through the machine and male voices sounded concerned, confused, worried. It sounded important, but I couldn't understand it. They sounded worried, so I stopped, to try to figure out what was happening.

Then the tunnel vision started.

I managed to stagger off the machine before lowering myself to my hands and knees. Once I managed that, without cratering the floor, I carefully lowered myself further to a prone position before rolling onto my back.

The tunnel vision got worse. I was breathing even faster.

 _What is happening? I don't understand?_

I slowly turned my head. Trying to move my head quickly made the tunnel vision worse.

 _Is that Kongo, laying on the ground?_ _ **Kongo? On the ground?**_ _And Defiant?_

 _Was this all a dream?_

The tunnel vision collapsed like a soap bubble and I fell into darkness.

* * *

One hour later

* * *

"No more indoor exercises for you two." Defiant was standing, looking down at me.

I shook my head, which proved it was possible for it to hurt even worse. Then I looked up at him. "Sorry, why am I laying on the ground?"

Suddenly, I realized that my legs and skirt were in a _far_ from modest position, and quickly pushed my skirt down while pulling my legs together from where they had been splayed immodestly far apart.

 _How did I get into that position? I glared up at Defiant._

"I need an explanation for this, Defiant." I stared up at him. "One minute I'm doing the tests on your machine, and the next, I'm lying on the floor?"

I heard Kongo groan and then speak with anger in her voice. "Yes. An explanation. My head hurts. I remember collapsing and not being able to stay awake. I haven't had a headache like this since I took an armor-piercing bomb to my left ear."

Defiant looked nervously at Kongo, and quickly said "Oxygen deprivation."

"What?" Kongo and I asked at the same time.

"Your metabolism. As strange as your abilities are, your strength is driven by some sort of chemical metabolism, unlike most brute-type capes who receive power through their shards. I should have realized that when it became clear that human food was required to fuel you, but I was interested in other things."

My head felt awful. I pushed myself to my knees. "I'm still not getting it, Defiant. Use words I'll understand."

"Fubuki, you are a fifty-thousand horsepower metabolic engine."

"I knew that. And?"

"The training room is a closed room."

"I follow that too. And?"

Defiant shrugged. "You used up most of the oxygen in the room and knocked us all out. We humans recovered first as the air conditioning system replenished the air in the room, because we're less dense."

"Oh."


	3. Chapter 3

"There she is again, Kongo." I said, quietly, without looking at the woman as she rode her bicycle along the edge of the wet sand on the beach.

"It's not like she's the only one who comes out to watch us work, Fubuki."

"She's watching us differently though. Haven't you noticed?"

Kongo stopped in the water next to today's job, a rusted out hulk that used to be a cargo container ship. "You asked me to not look at her directly, Fubuki, because I was scaring her away. My close-in sensors aren't as good as yours." She paused. "So, no, I haven't noticed."

"Oh, right. Sorry." I climbed up the side of the ship, smashing holes in the thin steel to create handholds. As soon as I left the water, my rig disappeared, and the woman on the beach immediately shifted her attention to Kongo, watching through a pair of binoculars.

"Whenever either of us leaves the water, and our rigs disappear, she immediately switches to watching the other, if they still have a rig active."

"So she's not watching us, she's watching our rigs. Even that's not unique. Do you remember what Defiant looked like when we showed him our rigs?"

I went into a brief spasm of laughter as I continued smashing handholds in the hull of the ancient wreck. "I remember, yes." I deepened my voice to imitate Defiant. "Oh. Oh. Oh. That's fascinating. I. Uh. Can I touch them?"

Both of us started laughing, remembering the moment.

After Defiant had spoken those words, Kongo, being Kongo, could not resist a little verbal jab. When she replied "What about Dragon? She might get upset." Defiant had realized what it sounded like and the lower half of his face that we could see went red in embarrassment.

The next thirty seconds of stuttered apologies had been hilarious before Kongo and I had relented and apologized to him. Then we let him poke and prod at our rigs to his heart's content for about two hours, before he sighed and walked off, grumbling something about not understanding the miniaturization process.

I finished climbing up the side of the ship and looked around. There were no obvious signs of habitation, but Dragon had given us little drones, so we could be sure. I pulled a half a dozen of the little drones from my backpack, and let them loose. They immediately rushed off, flying and crawling at high speed, looking for life signs on the ship. I followed behind them. Opening doors for them when they beeped at me to let me know it was necessary. In about thirty minutes, the drones and I cleared the entire wreck. While we were doing that, Kongo had been throwing heavy steel cables over the top of the ship, each cable making a resounding *klang* noise as it slapped against the rusted steel.

Returning to the side of the ship, I called down to Kongo. "All clear, Kongo. I'll rig up the cables now."

 _I have an idea, Kongo._ I sent by radio, rather than by audio.

 _What idea?_ Came the response, a few seconds later.

 _When I come down off the side of the ship, I'm going to intentionally fall. You drop the cables and take me to shore. The closest point on the shore is about a hundred meters from the human watching us. I want to see if maybe she will approach us if she thinks I'm hurt._

 _You are going to intentionally fall? Why risk that, just for some human that watches our rigs?_

 _I won't fall far, Kongo, just far enough to be convincing._

 _I don't like it. But I_ _ **am**_ _a little bored. You fall no more than a few meters. That's an order, Fubuki._

 _Yes, Kongo. Remember, don't look at her as we approach shore. I'm going to pretend to be in distress._

 _Nothing like a little kabuki to make the time pass. This should be fun._

We couldn't deviate from our pattern too much, or the woman might figure out we were faking. So I spent a couple minutes connecting the cables to the anchor mounts and mooring cleats. We were hoping this ship would be structurally sound enough to pull it on shore so the dockworkers could cut it up. If it wasn't, we'd drag whatever part of it broke off to the cutting beach, and collect the rest, piece by piece.

When I finished I started climbing down the side of the ship, and when I was several meters from the water, I started talking to Kongo. "Everything seems solid, Kongo. I think this one will pull cleanly." I intentionally missed a handhold, and flailed, falling backwards.

Two-point-oh-eight million kilos of me hit the water _hard_. Harder than I imagined possible. I fell through the water and struck the side of the derelict ship a couple meters underneath the water. My left leg punched through the skin of the ship, and my port torpedo tube launcher was wrenched nearly off.

I gasped in pain, and my lungs filled partway with water. I could feel water pouring down into my funnel as well. As I struggled, trying to free myself, it felt like my port torpedo tube launcher was trapped in the hole my leg had created.

 _Idiot. Idiot. Idiot._ I screamed at myself as I used my hands to tear the hole around my leg wider.

I wasn't floating.

I'd taken on too much water.

I started climbing up the side of the ship, underwater, rapidly smashing handholds into the metal and pulling myself up. Underwater, I had only a few seconds of energy left, at best.

One handhold at a time. Smash, pull, smash, pull.

I was barely conscious when I felt a hand grab my arm and drag me out of the water. I struggled as I felt myself being turned upside down. Water poured out of my funnel and my lungs. Then I coughed, and more water came out.

"You and I, we're having a talk later about this." Kongo promised me. "If I knew you intended this degree of incapacitation, I would not have agreed to it."

I could only cough. My radio was offline. I couldn't protest my innocence.

Kongo started dragging me to shore, and I wasn't able to help at all. My boilers had been flooded with seawater. My left leg had several lacerations on it, and my port torpedo launcher was basically scrap. There didn't seem to be any structural damage though.

It didn't take long for Kongo to drag my wheezing, coughing self to shore. We stopped in ankle-deep water and I fell to my hands and knees, still coughing, a little bit of water coming out with every cough.

Kongo started looking at my left leg. "Doesn't look like structural damage, Fubuki, but that's going to take some time to heal, and your port launcher is scrap."

There was a rattling sound and a splash of water, before a pair of black leather work boots appeared in my vision.

"You OK?" A female voice. Probably the woman I'd hoped to convince to come to us by faking an accident.

 _Idiot. Idiot. Idiot._ I repeated to myself, just to make sure I knew.

I coughed, and still couldn't speak much more than a croak, but I managed a "No."

The torque that Dragon had given me to translate my spoken Japanese into English when it detected someone speaking to me in English seemed to be working despite the soaking it had been given.

The woman ran back to where she'd thrown down her bike. I heard zippers and buttons, and a lot of clinking and jingling. Then the woman returned, running.

Her lower body was covered with tool pouches, full of tools that were mostly new to me. A few of them looked like some of the odd tools Defiant had been using.

"You will tell me what you think you are doing, before you touch her." Kongo growled. "The first thing you will tell me is what you think you are seeing."

The woman's boots turned to face Kongo. "Smell it? Flooded boilers. Need to wash 'em out with fresh water, dry 'em and get them started again, or she'll rust. Port torpedo tubes damaged. Torpedo magazine housing cracked. Need to make sure there ain't any loose torpedoes or warheads rolling 'round in there."

"You can see those things?" Kongo asked in an incredulous tone. "Defiant could barely identify systems, never mind components."

The woman took two steps back. "You know Defiant?"

"We've been out in the bay, pulling derelict ships to shore for a month now. Of course we know Defiant. Do you think he could miss us?" Kongo's voice was firm.

The woman shook herself. "Defiant's good, but he _don't_ do vehicles. Nobody's better at vehicles than me. _Period._ You two are vehicle/organic crossovers. My power tells me what's wrong." She paused. "I can get her running right. I been making tools. I been watching you."

"Fubuki, is your torpedo magazine breached?" Kongo asked, suddenly.

I nodded and choked out a "Yes."

"Start working, Tool Girl." Then, in a very loud voice, just short of painful, Kongo started speaking to the people who had gathered. "Everyone except Tool Girl here needs to get away. Now. Clear the area. Someone call the police and fire department. There might be an explosion, and it could be a big one."

 _Thanks, Kongo, I needed that comforting thought._

The woman fell to her knees in the surf, next to my left side, and started poking at my damaged torpedo launcher with an odd tool that had a flexible tip that generated light. It connected by a wire to her goggles. "Wrench."

"What?" Kongo paused.

"Call me Wrench."

I coughed again, and Wrench gasped. "Don't. You trying to restart your boilers. Don't. You flooding out with fuel. Can smell it." She paused. "Shit. There a loose torpedo in there. I need to put it on a storage cradle. You can't move. None. Understand?"

I nodded, shut down my main fuel lines, and stopped trying to restart the boilers. All I had left for power were a couple small diesel generators, which basically would only let me communicate.

I glared at the shallow surf, furious with myself. _Being on my hands and knees, at the mercy of an unknown human woman who might or might not have any idea what she's doing poking around in my port side torpedo magazine was not part of the plan._

After several minutes, Wrench sagged, breathed out a loud breath and pulled two tools out of my port torpedo magazine. "Torp's on an undamaged rack now. Need to get you rinsed out with fresh water, and start boilers."

I verified that the loose torpedo had been stowed. "Thank you, Wrench."

"Don't say that yet, you won't like what's comin' next." She turned to Kongo. "Need fresh water. Enough to re-flood her boilers. Can you get some?"

There was a hesitation of several seconds before Kongo responded. "Is the torpedo stowed, Fubuki?"

"Yes, Kongo."

"Then, yes. I will be back shortly with fresh water." I heard Kongo start to run.

About two minutes later, Kongo returned, with a large white hose. "The firemen said they had fresh water in their tanker, so here's the fresh water."

"Can't control a fire hose, not strong enough." Wrench complained.

"You want to spray Fubuki's boilers out with fresh water, right?" Kongo asked.

"Exactly."

"I can do both. Stand back."

 _What?  
_  
Wrench stepped back several feet.

I felt Kongo grab my right ankle, and realized what was about to happen.

 _Oh, come on._

"Kongo, isn't there a better way to do this?" I begged.

In a flat, not-quite-angry voice, Kongo responded. "I'm not sure. But it should work, and I'm going to enjoy this after the worry you just put me through." She paused, and did a bad imitation of my voice. "I won't fall far, Kongo, just far enough to be convincing." She lifted me into the air. "I thought you knew what you were doing. I thought it might be funny. You didn't, and it wasn't."

By the time she had finished saying that, I was hoisted into the air by my right ankle. I was facing away from Kongo, looking at Wrench, upside-down.

"You faked all that, to trick me? Broke torpedo tubes?" Wrench was not looking very happy.

I coughed, and, since I was fully upside down again, more seawater came out. After the seawater was gone, I tried to explain. "It ended up being less faked than I planned." I paused. "I could tell that you were watching our rigs more than watching us. I wanted to know why."

Her face grew hard. "I see. I was curious, and 'cause of that, you almost killed yourself."

Kongo spoke. "Please wave to the firemen, Wrench. I asked them to turn on the water when we wave to them."

Wrench turned and waved.

I spent the next several minutes hanging upside down by one ankle with a fire hose spraying out my boilers through my funnel.

Kongo took far longer than was necessary, I'm certain. I couldn't struggle with my boilers all shut down. Just complain. None of my complaints were dignified with a response.

Wrench just stared at me, clearly upset, the entire time.

After my insides were thoroughly cleaned out, Kongo spoke again. "Wrench, wave at the firemen again, please."

Wrench waved. The water stopped, and Kongo lowered me into the surf, and then helped me get into a stable kneeling position.

Wrench approached with a small bottle of something and sprayed it into my funnel. It smelled almost like wood alcohol. "Start preheaters. Feed fuel. Ignite."

"What did you just spray into my boilers?"

Wrench spoke tersely, "Starter fluid. Not a lot. Do it."

I started the preheaters and then, a few seconds later, started feeding fuel. Ignition was rapid. I took a deep breath as energy flooded my body, and I was able to move again.

"Cycle port torps into main storage an' leave 'em there till port launcher heals. You can work." Wrench turned and walked away, stiff-legged, without saying anything else.

I carefully stood, and stared at her back as she walked away. "Thank you, Wrench."

 _I can't exactly consider her to be rude, considering how we had planned to trick her._

Wrench had been taking off her tool pouches and belts and rapidly, carefully stowing them on the saddlebags to either side of her bicycle's rear tire. She paused, and replied, emotionlessly. "Welcome. My bedside manner ain't great. Patients normally don't talk back to me."

To my right, and slightly behind me, Kongo spoke in a serious tone. "You're welcome to watch us any time, Wrench. I owe you a favor for saving this one from her own idea." Kongo put her hand on my shoulder and pulled me around, roughly, so I was facing her. "Fubuki owes you a favor, and an apology. Perhaps even her existence. Loose munitions are no joke." Kongo's eyes bored into mine.

 _Kongo originally sank partly due to a munitions explosion. I'm not going to enjoy the next talk we have in private._

I turned away from Kongo, towards Wrench, and went to my knees, leaning forward until my forehead touched the sand before I spoke. "Yes, Wrench. I owe you a great debt. I apologize for my plan to trick you into coming to us. I thank you for what you did to help me after my foolish plan fell apart. I am in your debt, and if you need help with something, you only need ask. If I can help, I will."

After about three seconds of silence, Wrench responded, with a little anger in her voice. "Stand up, dammit. I ain't Lung. I don't do control freak crap and didn't ask for anything." She paused, and closed her eyes for a second before continuing with her voice calmed down a bit. "Apology accepted. I get you being curious. I was spyin' on you."

As I began to stand, I heard Wrench pushing her bike towards the road.

Kongo broke the silence, speaking slowly. "You would make a good friend, I think, Wrench."

Wrench and I both turned to stare at Kongo, who shrugged. "A friend is honest, and forgives our imperfections."

After she stared at Kongo for a moment, Wrench turned away and pushed her bike towards the road, much faster than before, almost running through the loose sand. "You're wrong. I let all my friends die." The last few words were almost lost in sobs. When the bike was finally on the road, she pushed it between some parked emergency vehicles and was gone.

Kongo and I could only stare as she left us behind.

While we were trying to make sense of what Wrench had said, a small blonde-haired woman wearing a mask and a black and lavender suit approached us from the road. She was surrounded by half a dozen large, muscular men who were very carefully watching around her like escorts. Bodyguards. "I see you've met Wrench." She looked at me without speaking for about half a second. "Good. You aren't going to blow up any longer."

I looked up at her and raised my right eyebrow. Even though she was small, she was taller than me.

After smiling, the woman waved her hands in the air, and yelled out. "OK everyone, show's over, you can go home. Nobody's blowing up today."

As the crowd behind the police lines started to disperse, Kongo spoke. "Who are you, and what do you want?"

"I'm Tattletale, and I want to talk."

"Tattletale. Undersiders. Defiant told us not to trust you, but that you probably wouldn't do anything to bother us." As I finished, I crossed my arms.

"Defiant is a smart man." She paused. "When it comes to machines. Usually when he says something smart about people, he's parroting Dragon." Tattletale made a throwing-away gesture with one hand. "I'm not here to talk about Defiant. The reason I came here is because Wrench came here."

Kongo looked at me with a puzzled expression, and I shrugged. "I don't follow."

She sat down on the sand. "Sit. I need to tell you about Wrench. It's not a pretty story."

* * *

Thirty minutes later.

* * *

I looked at Tattletale and started ticking off what she had told me, one finger at a time. "So, the Slaughterhouse 9, a vastly superior force, attacked the Merchants. Wrench, who used to be Squealer, had a superior who was insane and would not listen to reason, would not retreat. She was emotionally attached to her superior, and in the end, still chose to flee certain death rather than join him in a hopeless battle over something that really didn't matter. Now she blames herself for his death, and the deaths of all the Merchants, who were, in reality, a pretty terrible 'family' but were the only family she ever knew."

"That about sums it up, Fubuki."

When Kongo and I looked at each other, Tattletale stood. "Before today, Wrench hadn't said a single word to anyone in nearly three years. If she communicates, it's written. I have her watched, and make sure to set up a soup kitchen near wherever she is squatting. If she figures out that I'm helping her, she moves, so I can't help her too much or she might leave the city. She hasn't created anything for herself but tools; that's a normal bike she rides. All she does is fix vehicles. Randomly, without any special features. If you haven't figured it out yet, tinkers generally can't make anything that isn't tricked out with all sorts of special features. Wrench is tortured, and I had hopes that she might approach you, since she was so fascinated that she broke her normal habits to come watch you."

"And I fouled the props." I sighed.

Kongo muttered a curse and then said "Today is really beginning to feel like kabuki."

 _Awful kabuki._

"Yup." Tattletale nodded. Then she shrugged. "It's not hopeless though. You cracked the shell. She talked to someone. That's as good a place as any to start."

"You wouldn't have come here and spoken to us just to tell us that." Kongo said, softly, but firmly.

Tattletale smirked. "Am I that transparent, Kongo?"

"I heard a lot of command decisions and deliberations on my decks, in my time, Tattletale. I don't think telling us Wrench's story was the reason you came to talk to us. That's background for the reason. Are you ready to tell us what you want?"

Tattletale smiled. "How refreshing." She bowed to us slightly. "I have ears in many places, and I overheard that in the dimension that you came from, none of your old crews were still alive by the time you incarnated in your current form, because of your enemies there, the Abyssals."

 _I only told Dragon that._

Tattletale sighed. "Fine. Yes. Dragon and I talk. We talk quite a bit, actually." She raised her right hand. "Between Dragon, Dinah, and a few other people, we found out that, even after Scion went bonkers, there are quite a few of your old crew from this dimension, and other dimensions, who are still alive."

 _My crew? Alive?_

I narrowed my eyes and stared at Tattletale. "Are they really our crew, or crews from the ships with our names, from these other dimensions?"

"My crew?" Kongo whispered. "Some of them are alive here?"

"Your memories seem to be extremely precise about your old crew and your old history, according to Dragon. We'll leave it up to you two to decide if you want to meet the men. If you do, we will arrange for transport. We've collected every bit of information we can on all the living crew from this dimension. If they match, we can start spreading the search to other dimensions."

"Why?" I asked.

Tattletale smiled. "What you are doing in and around the bay is worth rewarding. But, like Kongo said, there's something else that I'd like to talk to you about."

* * *

Two weeks later

* * *

 _Why keep coming out here to watch?_

There were about thirty old Japanese men watching Kongo and Fubuki today. Really old men. They were cheering as the two shipgirls performed maneuvers and fired their smaller weapons at drones over the bay, showing remarkable marksmanship. Kongo had gone out to the breakwater earlier and fired her main guns out over the ocean to where a barge had been anchored. The old men had cheered like they were watching football when one of them claimed Kongo made seventeen hits in four volleys at ten kilometers with plunging fire. Fubuki's ability to move on the water was astounding, Speedboats were faster, but speedboats didn't mass nearly two point one million kilograms.

 _All that, using vacuum tube electronics with less CPU power than my watch. The integration of the ship equipment into a humaniform biomechanical interface is so brilliant. I remember making-_

 _Stop lyin' to yourself, Sherrell, you never made anything worth a damn. All of your vehicles were drug-addled crap. If you'd been worth a shit, you could have made drones and vehicles that could have-_

I heard footsteps on the sand behind me, and turned.

 _Another really old Japanese guy. They're everywhere today._

"Excuse me, young lady. You seem to have found a good spot. Would you mind if I share it and watch the show?"

I looked at him. Stooped, and wiry, maybe a little over five feet tall. He had a cane in one hand, and a foldable chair in the other. He had stopped walking when I turned to face him, and was slightly wobbly on his feet. Definitely not a threat.

I shook my head, and turned away from him and lifted my binoculars to watch the shipgirls. They were now doing a live towing job of yet another ship to the breaking beach where the work crews would scrap them. There weren't many rusted-out ships left in the bay now. Some other capes had been showing up every now and then to help break down the ships that the shipgirls dragged to shore for recycling.

 _I could build a-_

 _No. How many times do I have to say no?_

 _How many times have I had to say no, since I helped that shipgirl?_

I tried to bury myself in my power's data, watching the shipgirls. Their base technology was so incredibly crude, but the miniaturization and organic interface made them beautiful anyway. My power was flooding me with ideas on how to modify and improve their rigs. I could give them so much. They seemed like-

 _They seem like the sort of heroes that might have saved my family, when I couldn't._

The old man smoothly unfolded his chair, in a practiced motion. A moment later, he carefully checked that the seat was properly unfolded and seated himself.

My power really wasn't interested in the chair, but it told me about the characteristics of the materials and construction. The lacquered wood was nearly as old as the man, the leather was over twenty years old, but oiled regularly. There was a flood of things popping into my brain that I could use the wood and leather for. I strangled the flood.

"Twenty-one November, 1944. At oh-two-forty-six hours, Imperial Japanese Navy Battleship Kongo was hit on the port side by two torpedoes."

 _Oh, come on. Don't you have grandkids you can torture with bullshit stories?_

I cut my eyes at him, but he wasn't looking at me, he was watching the shipgirls with a small pair of binoculars.

"A few dozen of my crewmates died instantly to the torpedoes."

The old man was silent for several seconds.

"I was fortunate enough to have been on the starboard side of the ship. Kongo was a tough lady. Even after the two torpedoes, she was still able to make sixteen knots, but that eventually slowed to eleven knots. We were slowing down the rest of the ships too much, and damage control couldn't stop the leaks. We separated from the rest of the task group and were ordered to head to port for repairs." He breathed out a sad sigh. "We never made it. There were fourteen hundred men on Kongo when one of the forward magazines blew. Two hundred of us made it into the water alive. I lost twelve hundred people I had been trusting with my life for months, some of them for years."

The old man had my undivided attention now. I _knew_ them ghosts.

"When the forward magazine blew, I had just gone down a hatch to service the stern pumps with a few other men." The old man set his little binoculars in his lap, carefully, still looking out towards the bay.

"The hatch above me was ripped off its hinges. The overpressure deafened me and knocked me off the ladder, but, fortunately, I didn't have far to fall. It only took me a few seconds to stand, but even before I was able to stand again, I could feel Kongo shifting in the water, settling forward, lifting higher in the stern. Quickly. I could feel it in my stomach. I could feel and hear Kongo's structure tearing itself apart, the vibrations and sounds transmitted through the skeleton of the ship. Popping, straining, tearing. Kongo was dying."

"What'd you do?" I heard myself ask, in a whisper.

"I saved myself." His head fell forward slightly, and he looked sideways, locking eyes with me. "And then I hated myself."

 _Oh, bullshit!_

I turned away from Tattletale's mindfucker and started to stand.

A calm voice cut through my cynicism. "Do you know how to commit harakiri? You might know it as seppaku." The man was unbuttoning his shirt.

I wanted to just walk away, but something about the old man wouldn't let me leave. He had a captivating intensity that I couldn't ignore.

 _Is he a master? I wouldn't put it past Tattletale._

He removed his shirt, and folded it across his lap, showing a torso that was little more than wiry meat on a skeleton.

"You take a tanto blade, stab it into your stomach, here." He leaned back slightly in the chair, and, with a jerk of his hand that made me jump, he jabbed the left side of his stomach with his right index finger.

"Then you cut to the right, across your stomach." This time the index finger moved slowly, dragging his finger along many long, narrow scars.

"If you don't have an assistant with a sword, to remove your head after you cut your stomach, you cut your throat." His right index finger slowly traced across his neck where there were a series of small scars.

He turned his head to me; his eyes slammed into mine as he whispered, just loud enough to hear. "I _practiced_. Many times. Just to make sure I would do it right, if I needed to."

"Why didn't you-" I couldn't finish the sentence.

After a moment, the man looked away from my eyes, to where Kongo and Fubuki were slowly dragging the derelict ship with cables. "Because I knew that it wasn't my fault. Kongo was sinking. I saw dozens of men run into the darkness, securing hatches and looking for wounded. But I knew Kongo could not be saved. I knew that if I stayed, I would die. When a ship sinks, it creates a massive vortex that will beat you to death against the ship if you aren't far enough away. If you are inside a big ship when it sinks, you will never push through the incoming water to escape."

"I-"

The old man did not let me finish. "You _know_ I was sent here to speak to you. I do _not_ deny it. I was not _asked_ to deny it. When we were told about what happened to you, I demanded to be allowed to speak with you. I was not the only one. I am, however, the only one who could walk far enough to come to you, across loose sand, unaided." He chuckled, briefly, dryly.

As his chuckle faded away, the old man slowly reached into the little bag on the back of his chair that his binoculars had come out of. With obvious care, he drew out a slightly curved oblate cylinder of wood about eight inches long, and two inches in it's widest diameter. He held it in both hands, staring at it for several seconds, and then, suddenly, tossed it to me. I caught it reflexively.

"That, young lady, is a tanto." His eyes bored into mine, and, again, I could not look away. "We were told enough of your history to know that you have every right to consider using it. A couple brief pains in the stomach and neck will end the daily suffering, if that is what you wish." He tilted his head forward slightly towards the cylinder in my hands. "I carried that blade everywhere for ten years, and it has been on display in my home, easily accessible, for the last sixty years." He started putting his shirt back on. "I don't need it anymore. I give it to you."

I collapsed back onto my butt and sat, staring at the tanto. The hilt and sheath were a light yellow lacquered wood, with black Japanese script and images of trees and rocks next to houses.

 _It's so beautiful._

I pulled the blade out and stared at it. My power recognized the quality of the metal and manufacture. The blade was nearly perfect and sharp enough that my power had no desire to use it as anything other than a blade.

I stared at the steel, the patterns in the metal reflecting sunlight as I twisted it slowly in front of my eyes. "So close to perfect."

The old man spoke slowly. "When I bought that blade, I spent a month's wages. If I was going to kill myself, I wasn't going to do it with a kitchen knife."

I returned to staring at the blade as it flashed in the sun. After a while, I'm not sure how long, I heard footsteps on sand, and looked up.

While I had been entranced with the blade, the old man had finished putting his shirt back on, stored his binoculars in the chair-back bag, and folded up the chair. He was standing in front of me, a little bit wobbly, carrying the chair in one hand and bracing himself on his cane with the other. A stick man with powerful eyes. "I am going back to join the others. You are welcome to join us. Or not. All of us know your story. All of us _lived_ your story. A lot of our fellow crewmates chose the tanto. All of us will understand, whichever you choose."

I said nothing. When I looked back down at the knife, the tanto, he said nothing. I heard him walk away, down the beach towards the other old Japanese men.

After about five seconds, I stood, carefully stowed the tanto in my bike's saddlebags, and pushed my bike along the beach towards the other survivors.


	4. Chapter 4

** POV Fubuki **

"Kongo, I think it worked. Well, she didn't run away."

I watched as Wrench pushed her bicycle towards the gathering of our surviving crewmen. Hachiro had been a young actor before the war, and was in great demand for kabuki on base during the war. After the war, he had gone back into acting, playing tragic roles and tortured souls for decades, because he couldn't do anything else. His skills had clearly served him well in the talk with Wrench.

"Hachiro was the right choice. Well, nearly the only choice." Kongo commented.

I pulled harder on the cable. We needed to get the hulk up to at least a few knots, so it would beach itself properly at high tide. The crews would come and start chopping it up for scrap at low tide.

"They are so old, Kongo. Frail." I shook my head. "It's hard to remember them as they were, and see them now, as they are."

Kongo looked past me at the shore, towards our crews, and then back forward. "Old and frail. They are that." She leaned a little bit more forward, and I heard the massive towing cables sing under strain as she pulled harder. "Proud. Bent, but not broken. Survivors."

I looked towards shore again. "It's so hard to not cry when I think about it, Kongo. They can't live more than another few years. Your Hachiro is one of the youngest, and he's ninety-one."

"At least we got to meet them, Fubuki." Kongo whispered, in a rough voice.

We both threw ourselves at the cables, even harder.

* * *

** POV Wrench **

I leaned my bicycle against a tent pole and stood, watching the old men. Missing limbs, oxygen bottles. Hearing aids. Pacemakers. Wheelchairs that made my power twitch and try to demand that I improve them. Several of the old men were sporting eye patches, like a gaggle of ancient pirates.

All of the oldest-looking ones wore baseball caps with a picture of a ship on it, in two different styles. I smiled a little, as I recognized that the images on the hats were of a battleship and a destroyer. It didn't take much brainpower to figure out who those silhouettes were supposed to represent.

Most of the old men with Kongo and Fubuki baseball caps watched me as I watched them. The ones that didn't, appeared to be blind. They weren't rude about it. They didn't stare, but they were clearly watching me. There were quite a few very old women present too, wives or daughters, probably. They watched me as well, looking back and forth between the oldest men and me. There wasn't any anger there, or jealousy that I could see, some worry, but not fear.

 _They don't like me makin' their men remember, I guess._

Walking around all the older men and women were younger men and women, even some girls and boys. Talking to each other, and the eldest men, fetching food and drinks, picking up dropped items, helping the elders move from place to place.

Children. Grand children. Great grand children. There were even a few toddlers and infants wandering around.

Everyone was speaking Japanese to each other. Everyone was dressed in clean, neat clothing. I looked down at myself. Torn, grease-stained clothing that I'd literally pulled out of a trash can and mended. I didn't stink too bad, I knew. I washed regularly in shelters, but I certainly didn't fit in here with these crisp, clean people.

 _You don't fit in anywhere, Sherrell. This is a mistake._

A powerfully-built middle-aged man with a bit of a gut walked up to me slowly, speaking in good English. "My grandfather would like you to join him, Miss." He pointed towards the man who had given me the tanto.

I looked down at my bike. It would still be in my sight if I sat in the empty seat. The saddlebags were locked.

I looked back at the old man. He crooked his finger at me, and smiled slightly. I nodded and followed the man that had been sent to fetch me, who I guessed was his grandson.

I felt the eyes on me, still not staring, but watching and then darting away, time after time. Not all hostile. Weird. Some of the youngest were giving me disapproving looks. There were a few sharp whispers from the elders, directed at some of the youngest who were looking at me in a disapproving way. Even though I didn't understand the language, I recognized the tone. The young people being spoken to sharply turned their eyes down and bowed slightly to their elders.

 _Not everyone wants me here._

As I approached, the old man spoke. "I did not introduce myself before, because my name didn't matter." He said, in English, as I approached. "Now it does. My name is Hachiro. I am one of Kongo's twenty-two surviving crew."

Everyone went silent as I sat. I huddled in the chair, starting to want to be anywhere else but here. They were all staring at me now, and I was fairly certain that most of them spoke English.

 _Girl, this is worse than crashing a wedding. These men have known each other seventy years. You got nobody here. They don't know you, you don't know them. Sure, they pitied you when they heard about you, like lots of other people. Now they want you to go away. Their families don't want a poorly-dressed dirty woman crashing the party._

I started to stand. A bony hand touched my arm, lightly, and I looked down at it.

"Wrench, two weeks ago, you might have saved Fubuki. We've been told that the way our girls are now, very few humans can repair them. You are the only human that the cape woman called Dragon knows, who actually understands how they work well enough to help them quickly and confidently."

He took a breath. "We always knew that our ships were alive, and cared about us, wanted to get us home safe. Now, it's more than a superstition. They are really our ships. They were watching us, and remember everything. There is no doubt."

 _Is this just them tryin' to get a good mechanic?_

 _Can I be mad if that what they want?_

"I..." I sat back heavily in the seat.

"They needed me. She needed me." I whispered.

There was a lot of nodding from the eldest men and women, and muttering that sounded approving.

"Right now, you are worried that we are judging you, because of your appearance. You are a stranger. Dirty, greasy, your hair is a mess, and all of us are clean and well-dressed. Am I right?"

I shrank back into my chair, and nodded, a tiny nod.

"Our wives warned us that you would be concerned about this. They wanted us to arrange for a small tent that we could let you clean up in, make yourself pretty, and give you new clothes. Someone else told us that you wouldn't accept that."

 _Probably Tattletale, meddling little bitch. And she was right, probably._

"So we decided on something else."

"I don't want nothing for what I did, Hachiro."

"We don't want to pay you, Wrench. You don't have to keep what we give you, consider it a loan that we're willing to let you keep, if you want. We just want you to feel a little more comfortable."

I looked at him suspiciously, and he laughed. "Really, Wrench." His laughter melted into deadly seriousness, and his eyes locked with mine. "We _know_ about unwanted help."

There was a muttering of old male voices in affirmation.

 _I knew they knew English._

A tiny young woman in a sailor's top and a miniskirt combination that looked like a schoolgirl's outfit walked through the crowd towards me, carrying a duffel bag.

 _Fubuki. How did she get here so fast from the breaker beach?_

 _Dummy, she can move at nearly forty-five miles an hour on water._

A few feet behind her, I saw Kongo, standing still, smiling a little.

 _And Kongo can get up to almost thirty-five miles per hour._

Fubuki stopped about three feet from me, and bowed briefly. "Kongo and both of our crews said I should be the one to give this to you. As Hachiro said, this is just something for today. You may leave it if you wish, when you leave." She held out the duffel bag.

I looked at the bag, doubtfully. Fubuki could lift a main battle tank with one hand. "How heavy is it?" My power was telling me that the bag was canvas, so it wasn't an obscene weight, but it could easily weigh more than me.

Fubuki smiled a little. "Only a couple kilos. You can lift it without effort. Promise."

I reached out and took the duffel, and moved it to my lap.

Hachiro sat back in his chair with a little smile, and Fubuki stood in front of me, slowly dry-washing her hands at her waist, with a slightly worried look on her face. She was so cute-looking, it was hard to remember that she wasn't human.

 _Sherrell, if you gonna leave, now's a good time, before you open this. You know they think it's gonna to be somethin' you like. They got Tattletale and Oracle, and Dragon on their side, working to..._

I sighed.

 _Try to help me._

 _Not gonna hurt their feelings. I saved Fubuki from a nasty potential boom, even if she didn't tell 'em why she needed help. They mean well. I'll leave whatever it is when I can get away. Not gonne to insult them by running away now._

I poked at the bag a little. It was not solid. "Can it break?"

Fubuki shook her head. "No."

 _What is it?_ _Probably some clothes._ I tried to cheat with my power, shaking the bag and poking it with my fingers some more. My power told me that whatever was inside was made of heavy cloth, but that was it.

As I poked and prodded at the bag and shook it next to my ear, there were some chuckles. When I realized what I probably looked like, I know I blushed.

 _Like a little kid at Christmas on those sappy shows they play every year._

Embarrassed slightly, I brought the bag from my right ear down into my lap, unzipped it, and pulled out a single, large, heavy piece of cloth. As I lifted the cloth into the air, it unfolded into a navy blue one-piece heavy cotton work suit.

It wasn't formal wear, but it was clean.

 _I can wear this._

"Thank you." I whispered before I stood up and quickly stepped into the work suit, which fit me loosely, but correctly, over my other clothing.

"I've talked with quite a few American Navy veterans. They called suits like that 'poopie suits'." Hachiro commented with a smile. "We didn't have such a colorful name for them, but anyone who's ever done repair work knows how right that name is."

I laughed a little, and the men around me laughed too. Most of the women frowned, clearly not approving of the name of the suit.

 _Why haven't I heard that term before? Is he kidding me?_

Hachiro paused. "We used them to keep dirt off of us, mostly, but they can hide dirt too. There's a bandanna and some cleanup wipes in the pockets too, for your face, hands, and hair. Our wives and daughters insisted you would want them, even if you didn't want fancy clothes."

"They were right." I chuckled as I dug through all the pockets, searching for the promised items and finding them after a few seconds.

There was some good-natured chattering around me as I used the wipes on my hands and face. Even in Japanese, I could tell the women were telling the men that they had been right, and the men were apologizing for doubting the women.

After cleaning up my hands and face, I quickly tied the black bandanna around my head to cover my hair.

Fubuki hadn't moved from where she was standing in front of me. I looked at her leg, which was still bandaged. My power gave me vague information about her body's condition. The rig was still there, somehow, in a way that I couldn't fully quantify. My power told me the rig was still slightly damaged, which wasn't a surprise, since I could see that her leg was still injured.

Then I saw her shake, for no apparent reason, and my power couldn't explain the shuddering. When I looked at her face I realized that she was crying, silently, staring at me, tears rolling down her cheeks.

 _Not human, my ass._

I felt myself start to tear up, sympathetically.

 _Aw crap. Cute little girls crying. Damn you, Tattletale._

"What's wrong, Fubuki?" I leaned forward and wiped a tear off her cheek.

"They hurt you so bad, Wrench." She whispered.

 _Who? Oh._

My mind froze, memories replayed in my mind's eye I watched again through binoculars from a hilltop far away.

I hadn't been able to _not_ watch the S9 wandering through Merchant territory, killing off my family. One of my garage helpers, Skelly, trying pitifully to drive one of my crappy old trucks, barely able to make it move. I had been too far away to see the gore, but close enough to recognize death.

 _Trainwreck, Skelly..._

 _Skidmark. Such an asshole. We weren't married, but he was mine, I was his. He wouldn't leave. The S9 could kill anyone. Siberian alone had beaten the shit out of Alexandria, and killed Hero. Skidmark still wouldn't run. He'd claimed some shitty concrete, dirt, and old warehouses and made them more important to him than his life, more important than our lives. Machismo was more important than us. But we were a thing. I abandoned him to die._

 _I left them_ _ **all**_ _to die._

I felt arms slowly, gently fold themselves around my shoulders. I had fallen forward off my chair to my knees. Fubuki had moved up a little, and was lightly hugging me, smelling faintly of jasmine, oranges, diesel, and gunpowder. When I moved against her, suddenly, to hug her harder, she didn't even budge, it was like pushing against a mountain. A mountain that was shuddering like I was.

"How long will it hurt like this!" I wailed.

A man's voice whispered next to me, barely audible. Hachiro. "The pain never goes away, young one." His voice was rough, like stones grating together. I shivered at the intensity, the pain. "All you can do is try to find something bigger than the pain. For me, it was my family and sharing my pain with others on stage. For others it was a cause. Some of us turned to building things and dedicating them to the dead. Some devoted themselves to various gods. Every survivor has their own path. If you don't find something bigger than the pain, the pain will end you."

 _Bigger than the pain? How?_

I raised my head and looked around. Dozens of people were looking at Fubuki and me. They weren't laughing; they weren't angry. The old men were nodding. Most of them were looking sad, even crying. I had helped one of their shipgirls, and they were doing everything they could to help me. The old men knew where I was, the wives and oldest children remembered where the old men had been decades ago. The youngest ones knew the stories.

It suddenly hit me: _Most of these men are still alive because they helped each other._

I whispered to them all. "What can I do? What can be bigger than the pain?"

My power, repressed for so long, took that moment to erupt into my mind abruptly, sweeping aside my efforts to repress it like a tsunami. Ideas for vehicles that could mine and refine raw materials. Vehicles working at my direction to create even larger vehicles that could move vast amounts of dirt and stone.

 _What? What does it-_

When I realized what my power was offering. I stopped resisting it.

* * *

** POV Fubuki **

I gently lowered Wrench's body to the ground. She'd gone unconscious after she declared something unbelievable that had silenced all of us. Three young men and a middle-aged woman, each with medical bags, were the first to recover, heading my way quickly.

Everyone had heard what Wrench had said before she went unconscious. There was a low mutter of hopeful disbelief, not disparagement. This world had people with vast powers, many of them even put shipgirls to shame.

What Wrench had said was insane, but so many things were insane in this world. We all knew what she was, what she had been. Even Kongo and I knew that tinkers were some of the most powerful capes, if they were given the materials they needed.

Kongo stepped up to me and offered me a hand, which I accepted and used to pull myself to my feet.

The fastest medical responder to arrive, a young man, dropped to his knees next to Wrench with a small medical bag. He checked her eyes, breathing, and pulse quickly, and then slowed down, not looking very worried.

"She is only unconscious, and should wake soon." There was a collective sigh of relief from the crowd. The young man turned Wrench's head to the side, and elevated her feet by putting them on his medical bag. He then sat in the seat she had been sitting in, and watched her, talking in low tones with the other medical responders.

"Can she do it?" I heard, over and over, questions directed at everyone. Even Kongo asked me.

I announced, loud enough for all to hear. "I will ask Dragon." I activated my radio and sent a message to one of Dragon's relays.

A few seconds later, I had the answer, and spoke it softly, with awe. "Yes, Dragon thinks it is possible. Not certain, but possible."

We all stared silently at the woman who had just declared she would rebuild the islands of Kyushu and Newfoundland.


	5. Chapter 5

"Bored." Kongo announced to the world.

I laughed some, but not too much. I knew exactly what she meant. "Me too, a little. I suppose it's not so bad for me. I'm used to being sent off on odds-and-ends errands."

We were sitting side-by-side, our feet hanging off the end of a dock, looking out at what had once been the boat graveyard. We'd hauled the last old wreck in six pieces to the breaking beach today. It had taken over a month, but the job was done.

Kongo reached up and tousled my hair. "Don't try to fool me, 'Buki. I know you're feeling it too. We're meant to fight Abyssals, and there aren't any on this world." She paused. "And I'm not really sure how hard Dragon and the others are working to find us a way home."

"That we know of."

Kongo looked at me, a little confusion evident in her face, so I clarified. "We haven't heard of any Abyssal attacks, but this Earth is connected to so many others through the portal system. Maybe the Abyssals are on one of the other worlds, a more damaged Earth, or an Earth with lower technology?"

I specifically didn't comment on how hard Dragon and the others might be working to find us a way home, because I suspected it was a low priority for them. It would be a low priority for me, with the damage Scion had done to these Earths. Kongo would have followed the same logic as me. Despite being something of a showboat and a flirt, she understood operational priorities.

"What did they call me again?" Kongo muttered. "Brute 7, Blaster 8, Mover 2"

I nodded. They had classified me as Brute 5, Blaster 6, Mover 3.

"And what's the next job they want me to do? Tear down old buildings using anchor chains." Kongo grumbled. "Where's the burning love in that? I'm not a construction worker."

"Well, after Wrench and the Japanese government straighten things out with Dragon and the international cape community, we'll be able to help over there."

"Doing more construction work." Kongo grumped.

"At least they speak Japanese there. I wouldn't mind being able to lose this thing Dragon gave me." I carefully touched the torque around my neck that held the translator.

"There is that."

"I've heard rumors of Kaiju as well."

Kongo's head swiveled like one of her turrets to face me. "Really?" She sounded hopeful.

"Really. But no solid evidence."

"I thought all the Kaiju except the Simurgh were inactive?"

I shuddered. "Not Endbringers. Kaiju. I hope the Endbringers never become active again. We've seen some of the video of what that could do as part of the education programs Dragon made for us. They make island princesses look like insects."

Kongo gave me a raised eyebrow look.

"I know you saw them too, Kongo. You were sitting next to me. Scion cracked the continental shelf and made new mountain ranges. He fought almost all of the Endbringers, but was only able to kill two. I'd fight them, you know it, but we don't have the sorts of powers needed to be effective against them."

"I suppose you're right." She leaned back, both arms with elbows locked torso at an angle. Kicking her feet in the air over the water. "I just feel so empty. What we're doing is helping. There's no doubt about that, but it's not what we're _supposed_ to be doing. How is everyone else doing with us gone?"

 _I really didn't want to think about that, Kongo. Thanks._

I'd been present when Dragon and Wrench were doing some planning. Arguing really. But they had agreed on a few things. One thing that Kongo didn't know about yet. Now would probably be a good time. "After Kyushu and Newfoundland, Wrench will be working to rebuild the United Kingdom."

Kongo went still. "Really?"

"If she is allowed to start, yes."

"Another thing I don't understand, 'Buki." Kongo grumped. "Wrench can rebuild the islands. Maybe not exactly like they were, but that's not necessarily a bad thing. I'm not sure how many people want Nagasaki back exactly how it was. Hiroshima is still there, and is enough of a reminder."

We both fell silent. Motionless. Thinking. Both of us had been sunk before the two atomic bombs had brought Japan to its knees and ended the war. We'd heard about it here, in this world, first. Kongo and I had not been in a very good mood for several days after that. Maybe it hadn't happened in our home Earth. Maybe it didn't matter after the Abyssals arrived.

After Dragon showed us those videos, Kongo and I spent three days breaking up ships by hand on the breaker beach after 'asking' the breaker crews to leave, not too politely.

The videos of the mushroom clouds, and the videos of the aftermath were real nightmare fuel. Literally. The Wardens were forced to move us to a new building away from other people after Kongo and Dragon had to wake me from a walking nightmare before I destroyed the Wardens' office that we'd been housed in. Fortunately, I hadn't been able to make it to the water. I was very thankful that Kongo hadn't had a walking nightmare. If she had, Dragon and I would have been hard pressed to stop her if she didn't wake up easily.

I still looked at the American flag with irritation, even weeks later. Two things made it bearable. First, the Americans seemed genuinely sorry that they had been forced to use nuclear weapons on Japan. Second, those of our crew who were still fully mentally capable made it very clear to us that Japan had probably suffered less in the long run then it would have otherwise. They told us about the suicide planes and the suicide submarines. The efforts to arm and train children for war. They told us about Iwo Jima and Guadalcanal, and were certain that those battles would have been repeated across all of Japan.

In the end, if our crew could mostly forgive the Americans for what they had done, how could we do any less?

Kongo had been silent while I thought. Probably thinking similarly. We really were a lot alike in our minds, even if our bodies and rigs were so different. "Japan's government and Canada's government wants Wrench to rebuild. How or why does anyone else have any right to interfere?"

I had asked Dragon the same question. "There are a lot of people who don't trust her, you know. She's going to be creating construction machinery that can actually shape the surface of the planet in significant ways. For the last three years she's been a broken person. For years before that she was a drug addict, and part of a pretty brutal gang. Even the governments of Japan and Canada want her to put safeguards on the machines that will be dredging the ocean floor and rebuilding the land."

The girl who had been sitting on the docks a few meters away from us, watching us for the last fifteen minutes or so finally spoke, bitterly. "Poor little Japanese girls. No inhuman monsters to kill to save humanity. At least you can help somehow."

Kongo and I both looked at each other. The girl looked at us oddly for a second, and then relaxed when we didn't say anything to her.

I sent Kongo a radio message.

 _Americans are so rude and strange sometimes. You want to talk to her, or me?_

 _You do it, 'Buki. I could use a laugh._

 _I'll try for the laugh, Kongo, but she sounded about as bitter as we've been recently._

 _I'll settle for someone interesting to talk to if you can't make it funny._

 _Turn towards her on three... two... one... Now._

The two of us turned, twisting our torsos to face her, and I started to speak through the translator. "Good day, rude, bitter, African-American girl. I am Fubuki, and this is Kongo. You are?"

Her reaction was worth it. She had been lounging like us, leaning back against her straightened arms, her legs stretched out on the dock. When I addressed her, she was clearly startled. Her hands slipped and she fell back, hitting her head on the dock.

"Ow." She quickly hopped to her feet. "You can see me."

Kongo sent me a radio message, crackling with laughter. _Thank you. That made my day._

 _I live to serve, oh, mighty Kongo._ I sent back.

"We do have eyes." I poked my fingers at my eyes to demonstrate. "It's not like you were trying to hide. You just walked up and sat behind us."

"You saw me the whole time." Her voice was incredulous, like it was some sort of surprise that we would notice someone walking up behind us.

Kongo was quickly losing patience, after the first chuckle. "We're shipgirls. Warships. Rude girl, if we weren't watchful, we wouldn't be here, we'd have been sunk again at some point in the past."

The dark-skinned girl's mouth opened wider before it snapped shut. "I. Err. I apologize for seeming rude to you, but most people have no idea when I'm around unless I make an effort to allow them to see me. She stood. My name is Imp."

"Hello Imp. Undersiders, right?"

"That's me." She got to her feet, and bowed slightly to us. Crudely, a clumsy bow, but she seemed sincere. "I hope I got this right. Everything I know about saying hello to Japanese people I got from martial arts films."

Kongo and I both laughed. It wasn't the first time we'd heard something like that, but Imp's clumsiness made her seem sincere. Most of the others who said it were actually able to bow almost right.

"Dragon told us about you, but didn't give us a description, because she didn't think we would see you. I see I misunderstood her meaning."

Imp grinned. "Dragon is one of very few people who can see me, because she's a machine. I guess that means you two are machines too?"

Imp wasn't the first one to say something like that. "No. We are not machines. We bleed, even if we're much tougher than a person." Imp was staring at the two of us more closely now. "We're the spirits of warships that sank in World War II, Imp. We don't have powers like humans in this world have powers."

"Weird." She looked between the two of us. "No space whale magic in your brains?"

Kongo and I both laughed.

I spoke first. "None. Not unless whatever made us also made Abyssals..." I had a very bad thought.

Kongo looked at me. "I don't think so, 'Buki. Scion and Eden didn't kill off almost all humans on Earth before he started. Abyssals did. If the Abyssals are something like Scion and Eden were, they would probably act similarly. Unless the space whales can be very, very different from one another."

"I suppose you're right, Kongo. Still, it's a disturbing thought."

Kongo nodded. "So, Imp, you heard us complaining, and it sounded like you were making light of our complaints. What gripes do you have about the world? You have an audience now, if you want it. It doesn't sound like you get audiences much."

Imp bit her lip and looked at us closely for a couple seconds, then shrugged. "You two are complaining about not being able to help the way you want. I can barely help at all for things that really make a difference. My power is for people to never be able to see or remember me. That's it. The only thing I'm good for is spying on people, or killing them. You two are high rated brutes. You can always get your hands dirty and do something useful." She grinned. "Like tearing down decrepit buildings with anchor chains. Hand me a shovel, and all I can do with it is beat some goon over the head."

"I mean, I'm trying to get a good education too, but it's difficult to learn when people don't pay attention to you. It's hard for me to pay attention to a teacher and learn, while at the same time staying visible so the teacher can know I'm there if I have questions." She shrugged. "I'm reading a lot of books, and Tattletale is helping me with vocabulary and suggestions for good books, but it's not the same. Makes me wish I'd paid closer attention in school before I became the invisible woman."

Kongo nodded. "I can see where that might be a problem, Imp." She stood up. "'Buki, let's show Imp here a few simple bows."

I sent a radio message. _Kongo. What are you thinking? I know you._

 _'Buki. Dragon told us that all of the Undersiders were reasonably decent people, but on the wrong side of the law. Maybe Imp would be interested in a clean slate?_

I stopped and stared at Kongo as I stood and stepped into my shoes. _I'm missing something. What am I missing, Kongo._

 _I feel sorry for the poor girl, no Admiral will ever pay attention to her without her having to think about it._

Kongo and I demonstrated a few different bows, and explained why they were different. Imp was a very fast learner.

 _Not adding up, Kongo. You're trying to use the Admiral thing to hide something. Out with it._

 _You're no fun, 'Buki. I'm pretty sure Japan is going to agree to have Wrench rebuild Kyushu._

 _I agree. Go on._

 _I'm also pretty sure that Japan is going to agree to have her rebuild the land, Fubuki, even if the rest of the world says 'no'. If that happens, it would be awful nice if Wrench had an invisible bodyguard, wouldn't it? Wrench is no Admiral, but she's a good person. Imp wants something important to do. Protecting the person who is literally helping to rebuild parts of the world. I bet she'd like that._

 _Maybe. We need to ask around and make sure the two of them don't hate each other. When Defiant tried to suggest that Riley and Wrench work together on upgrades for us, Wrench almost exploded. I've never seen her that angry, Kongo._

 _I can't believe Defiant even asked. Dragon apologized for him later. You weren't there for it. Riley was in the Slaughterhouse 9 when they killed Wrench's people. Riley also dissected Imp's brother. She was one seriously messed-up-in-the-head child with power that could do wonderful and horrible things. There are a lot of people that wouldn't hesitate to kill her on sight. Dragon is fighting about thirty legal battles against extradition and trying to settle cases with guilty by reason of insanity pleas that don't result in death penalties. That's why Riley goes nowhere without three dragon remotes._

 _That... Explains a lot. Riley was in the S9? Bonesaw was the little girl one, right? Why wasn't I told?_

Imp was staring at the two of us. "You're talking somehow, aren't you?"

I looked up at Imp. "We are. Sorry."

She tilted her head a bit. "About me?"

"In part, yes. What do you think about Wrench?" Kongo had apparently decided to use sledgehammer subtlety.

Imp crossed her arms and looked back and forth between the two of us. "She was pretty annoying when she was Squealer, and pretty bad off for a couple years after the S9 came through." Imp's eyes got hard. "A lot of us were."

Kongo and I looked at each other, briefly, as Imp went silent.

After a couple seconds, Imp's expression softened and she shook her head. "I've got no problem with Wrench. She's been through at least as much horrible shit as me, and Tattletale was telling me she's really starting to turn around. From what I've heard, she's even talking about building giant robots or something to rebuild the islands Leviathan and Scion messed up."

"Well, anyone who wants to make big changes, they sometimes make powerful enemies." Kongo started. "It's always good-"

Imp's eyes suddenly got large, and she interrupted Kongo. "You're trying to poach me."

I looked at Kongo, who looked a little crestfallen, then at Imp, who looked more surprised than angry. "Is there a problem with that, Imp?"

"Protect Wrench while she rebuilds islands? I'll talk to Tattletale about it. I don't think she'll mind. You two will be there too?" Imp looked between the two of us. The second question was clearly important to her.

 _Poor girl, she must be so lonely with that power._

I watched Imp's face as I spoke. "For the first, if Wrench agrees, yes. For the second, yes, we will accompany Wrench. She's the only person we've met who can service us properly, or repair us if we are damaged severely. The two of us are already planning on protecting her. You've got an ability that would complement us well."

She smiled hugely. "I'll say yes now, and deal with anyone else who tries to say no, later." She paused. "If Tattletale or the other Undersiders need me though, I might have to take some time off now and then, maybe with short notice. Giant robots! Japan! Ninjas!" She rubbed her hands together.

Kongo looked at me and smiled. A quick radio signal shot from her to me. _Nicely done 'Buki._

Imp hopped up next to Kongo, hip to hip, and poked her in the shoulder. "So, I heard you talking about 'burning love' earlier. Is that some sort of shipgirl-only thing?"

Kongo grinned hugely. "It all depends on what you mean when you say it."

Another brief radio blip from Kongo. _I like her already._

I followed behind the two of them as Kongo described the 'fine arts' of attracting admirals and firing broadsides of fourteen inch shells.

I practiced my face-palming technique several times. Imp gave me some pointers.


	6. Chapter 6

I knocked on the door to the control cabin.

A little camera swiveled above the door, and pointed at me, so I waved at it, before putting my hand against a pressure plate to demonstrate my strength until the green light flashed..

The intercom came to life. "C'mon in, Fubuki."

Wrench's voice sounded like she was in a good mood, but I entered cautiously anyhow. I'd been in the room during her last argument with the IRS. They were apparently trying to assign a value to the WS _Big Lug_ , so they could tax her on it.

Wrench had told them, I quote, "Fuck off. I more'n paid my share by diggin' a new Panama Canal. You got problems, you talk to Dragon. I ain't got the time for red tape bullshit. If'n I really gotta pay some crazy-ass taxes on the ship, Dragon'll talk to me. Not you. Never call me again."

When the woman in her pinstripe suit tried to keep talking, Wrench punched the camera, and the image of the woman on screen jumped back from her camera.

Before she disconnected the call, Wrench apologized. "Sorry. I'm allergic to bullshit. It makes me punch things. I also don't like people that can't follow simple instructions. I told you to talk to Dragon."

As the door opened, I stepped barely inside, just enough to block the door until it closed. One of the simpler Master/Stranger protocols. There had already been one kidnapping attempt, and Imp had stopped it. Another super sneaky stranger type, but he had needed to know someone was there to hide himself. Imp's power trumped that. He could even effect Kongo and probably me.

Kongo had nearly flipped when Imp tossed the unconscious man at her feet, ten steps from Wrench. Especially when Dragon confirmed he was carrying both disabling chemicals and deadly chemicals.

Dragon said the man was a known Chinese government espionage cape. China really didn't like Wrench's plans to rebuild Kyushu for Japan. Despite everything Scion had done to this world, and the fact that almost nobody still alive had memories of World War 2, the Chinese still had issues with what Japan had done. In a way, I couldn't blame them. Imperial Japan had been brutal. I had been an Imperial Japanese Navy ship, and I still had issues with some of the things that happened during the war.

"Whatchu want, Fubuki?" Wrench muttered around the stylus she had in her mouth like a toothpick, as she used both hands in the remote waldos.

"We've made our decision, Wrench."

She straightened and gave me her undivided attention. "Oh, dat was quick. What answer?"

"No."

The undivided attention immediately divided again and she turned back to her waldos. "Can't make ya say yes. Not the right choice, don't think, but yours to make."

"We hope to go home, Wrench, one day." I paused. "Would you come with us?"

"Maybe. Still some tings ta do here. Dragon noodle out where ya came from yet?"

I shook my head. "No. Not yet."

"When ya figger it out, lemme know." She was losing track of the conversation already.

"I, err, expected you to argue more."

That got some of her attention back. She tilted her head back at me. "Dat's why Kongo had you come alone? 'Fraid I'd piss her off like last time?"

I nodded. "You called her weak. She likes you, but she's proud."

"Ya'd both be tuffer an' stronger if'n you let me refit ya." She nodded. "I get it tho'. If I refit ya, and ya git home, dey might not be able ta maintain or repair ya. Dat's why I ain't arguing more."

"Exactly. Thank you for understanding, Wrench."

"Eh? Could make ya some periphs. Zero point generator, kinetic screen, guided munitions? Stuff like dat. If'n ya go home and dey can't maintain or fix, just remove it and replace with OEM?"

 _That does sound interesting._

"Nothing that couldn't be pulled and replaced back home? I'd like to hear more details. Kongo might too, but let me talk to her first."

Wrench nodded energetically. "Not good as a full refit, but you'd be tuffer an' hit harder ina fight."

 _Why didn't she offer this at first?_

 _Nevermind. Tinker._

"How long-"

Wrench interrupted me with a lazy wave as she turned back to her waldo tank. "Got plans. Show ya after dinner."

* * *

** A few minutes later.

"Could you imagine what she could do on our world, Buki?" Kongo threw a rock into the water. "It's like she considers laws of physics to be optional."

I started to laugh.

"What?"

"Humans say the same thing about us, Kongo. Especially at mealtimes. Sometimes more pointedly at some of us than others."

I ducked the playful attempt to put me in a headlock.

Kongo pretended she had only been spinning around with her arms outstretched. "Whole different scale, Buki. Look at _Big Lug_ , here. It's one of the largest manmade objects I've ever heard of, and it's a ship."

I nodded and looked around at the vessel.

Kongo jumped a few inches into the air and landed, carefully, before going motionless, probably trying to determine if the vessel moved even the slightest when she jumped. "This is just so weird. Being a passenger."

"Wouldn't you love to see the expression of some Abyssal task force finding this on radar?"

Kongo smiled. "Definitely. They would probably think it was an uncharted island."

"I'm not so sure it isn't. Six kilometers long and four kilometers wide. That's much bigger than Midway."

"And we're carrying nearly five cubic kilometers of crushed rock and a dozen two-kilometer-long, hundred meter diameter mining worms as cargo." A serious expression came to Kongo's face. "Could you imagine what sorts of warships she could design?"

"No. I can't even dent this unobtanium stuff, whatever it is."

Kongo turned to me with a bit of a smile. "Stasis field reinforced mild steel hull." Kongo thumped her heel onto the surface, hard.

"Mild steel?" I gaped at the metal hull under our feet.

"Reinforced by some sort of energy. That's what she said when Dragon asked her."

"Colin said it was Unobtanium."

"I think that's some sort of science fiction geek word for something that can't exist in the real world."

"Then how..." I closed my eyes and sighed. "That explains why he laughed when I said thank you."

Kongo turned back towards the bow of the ship, or island, or whatever _Big Lug_ was, and held her hands together behind her back. "So, she didn't throw a fit, or insult you?"

I stepped up to her side and looked ahead, the wind blowing through my hair. We were only making five knots, but it was so... weird, to not be directly on the water. Seeing five meter swells, with absolutely no detectable motion of the deck was also crazy. "No, she was calm, and accepted our decision without arguing."

She went stiff, and then turned to look down at me. "Really?"

Her expression was almost enough to make me break down laughing, but she had good reason for the incredulous look. Wrench might be a social wallflower. She had enough self-hate issues that she carried Hachiro's tanto with her at all times and frequently held it in her hands like she was seriously considering using it. She'd even asked if either Kongo or I would be her second if she decided to end her own life.

That had been an awkward conversation. In the end, Kongo had agreed to be Wrench's second, if needed, but only after Wrench rebuilt Kyushu, Newfoundland, and the UK, like she had promised. Kongo also made certain that if she had the opportunity to go home, she would not be bound to stay to honor the promise to be Wrench's second. Wrench had agreed.

In other words, Wrench was quite a mess mentally, but that ended abruptly if you disagreed with her where her power as a vehicle tinker was concerned, or somehow tried to take her stuff. Kongo and I, as shipgirls, fell into the edges of her power's domain. Which had led to the brief, nasty squabble between her and Kongo.

The two of us turned back towards the water.

There had been other recent squabbles as well. When Wrench had been known as Squealer, she was, as she called herself, a drug-addled, ignorant little bitch with no vision beyond her next fix or orgasm. Most of the cape community considered her something of a joke if they even knew who she was. A tragic joke after what the S9 did to the only people she ever knew as family, but still a joke. Squealer had been rated as a Tinker 2, Mover 3.

For years, she barely used her power, some sort of strange tinker mental self-mutilation or severe depression. After returning to consciousness at the get-together of mine and Kongo's surviving crew, where she'd said she would rebuild Kyushu and Newfoundland, she'd excused herself abruptly and jumped onto her bicycle and left.

Kongo and I were not leaving our crews. Not even for Wrench, unless there was some sort of a fight or natural disaster. We did call Dragon, who agreed to send a remote to watch over her.

The next day, Wrench dropped out of the sky in front of the building we were staying in. She was driving a flying truck with tentacles. No propellers, no jets. She said she was in a hurry, and quickly gave us her phone number before leaving.

The next day, she was back, with a surprise. A big surprise.

* * *

** Flashback to Three Months Earlier

"Dragon, do we have time for breakfast? Or at least time to finish tea?" Kongo complained.

Dragon's remote shook its head. "I'm afraid not. I've got one of my remotes there, and I don't think the New York City team will attack her, but we can't protect-"

Kongo's head turned towards Dragon like one of her turrets. "We have told you that we will not fight humans, unless we are forced to."

Dragon stopped moving, very briefly. "Apologies. I have not mentioned that the individual in danger is Wrench."

I set down my tea and stood. Kongo was only a half second behind.

"Where is she?" I asked.

"She's about two kilometers offshore. Straight out from the inlet. You can't miss her. I'll meet you there."

* * *

** Flashback continues outside the bay

Kongo's mouth dropped open as we cleared the docks and got a look out past the breakwaters.

There was a ship out there that was bigger than anything I'd ever seen. Radar told me it was five hundred and twenty meters long. There was what looked to be a coast guard cutter alongside.

 _Maybe the Mako?_

I patched Kongo in and opened a radio channel to Dragon.

 _"She's in the big ship, or the little one?"_

 _"The big one. She made the ship. Last night," Dragon replied._

 _"Say again?" Kongo demanded._

 _"You heard correctly. She raided Fresh Kills Park last night and mined out what she needed from the landfill underneath to build that thing."_

 _"All in one night?" I asked for confirmation._

 _"Bloody Hell," Kongo muttered._

 _"I agree," Dragon responded. "It seems as if we need to adjust Wrench's tinker rating. Significantly. She designed a self-replicating landfill mining and recycling vehicle. After she had a bunch of them, she built the ship."_

 _"She did it without anyone noticing?" I asked._

 _Dragon was silent for several seconds. "Most of what her recyclers did was underground. The ship was built on the sea floor. I was watching her on the surface in the original vehicle, but not closely. I was busy elsewhere. It took a while for the first vehicle to make the second vehicle, and then the second vehicle went underground. I didn't realize it was automated, because she was in the first vehicle. She never went underground herself, and stayed in the first vehicle, working on a computer. I had no idea what was really going on until this morning when five hundred vehicles tunneled out of Fresh Kills-"_

 _I accidentally interrupted her. "Wow." I immediately apologized. "Sorry, Dragon."_

 _"No need. That's what I thought too. It got worse when a freighter popped onto radar a couple kilometers off shore and she flew out to it with five hundred vehicles. I had what humans call an 'Oh Shit' moment._

 _"So, what's the danger? Why are people angry? She mined out a landfill. Was someone hurt?" Kongo interjected._

 _"Some homeless people were shaken up in some collapses, but nothing more than a few broken bones. That's not the problem. The problem was that she-"_

 _Wrench's furious voice broke in. "I'm hearin' you, Dragon. Da problem is dat most capes are cockwads and elected goons 'r worse. They sayin' I had ta ask ta dig up fuckin trash? They trying to take my ship?"_

I spoke out loud to Kongo. "There goes privacy."

She nodded. "We can set up codes later."

 _Dragon spoke on channel, her tone calm. "Wrench, you scared a lot of people this morning."_

 _Wrench shouted back. "Gonna fuckin' scare a lot a shitheads worse if dey don't stay da fuck away from ma ship. I gots things ta do."_

 _"Colin said that you said you didn't have any weapons on the ship, and you were telling the truth." Dragon sounded nervous._

 _"I didn't. An hour ago when the shitheads started jabbering at me about stealin' they trash. They fuckin' trew it 'way. I'll let you figure out what I buildin' after dey started sayin' they wanted ta take my fuckin' ship."_

Kongo shook her head and pointed at me. "All yours, Fubuki."

 _Thanks, Kongo,_ I thought as I shook my head in resignation.

I went back on channel again.

 _"Wrench, did you tell the capes from New York what you are going to do, for Kyushu and the other places?"_

 _"Fuck 'em, dey came out yellin' an' threatenin' me. I din't tell 'em shit."_

 _"Dragon?"_

 _Dragon was silent for a second. "They should know, Fubuki. I did send them the report. I'll make sure."_

A couple minutes later, Kongo and I took up station next to Wrench's ship. Dragon was on the Coast Guard cutter, talking with a bunch of people in spandex and masks.

Dragon, Kongo, and I had discussed the options, briefly

 _I hope this works._

As agreed, Kongo shouted _very_ loudly:

 **"This ship is now under defensive escort. Any attempt to board without a warrant will be met with force. The occupant is now being represented legally by Dragon. Direct your questions and concerns to her."**

I returned to the radio channel after the coast guard cutter moved about a kilometer away.

 _"You built this ship overnight, Wrench?"_

 _"Nah. Built itself, mostly. Once I had tha second truck made, I set it loose ta make more. Din't have ta do nothin' New Man Von machines, or somethin' like that. While dey was makin more of themself, I designed the ship. Pretty easy. Hardest part the reactor. Wasn't sure I'd find the uranium or plutonium I needed to initiate the thorium reaction. I found enough tho'. Lots more than I needed."_

 _Dragon commented on channel. "Von Neumann machines?"_

 _"Ya, dat's dem. Read about 'em once in school. Seemed like a neat idea."_

 _"You found uranium and plutonium in the landfill?" Dragon sounded irritated._

 _"Yup. Dickheads trow away all sort of shit dey ain't s'posed to. Found a couple of dem fuel rod casket thingies. Took it all. Tiny Tim will burn it up. Still nasty shit left after, but not as nasty."_

 _"Tiny Tim? Dickens?" Kongo asked. I could hear she was amused._

 _Wrench chuckled. "I read dat one in school too. Tiny Tim's stage two. He's too tiny to rebuild Kyushu. I figger all da metal from every dump and boat graveyard on da east coast might be enough to get started on Big Lug. The rest I can get by mining._

 _Dragon broke in again. "A lot of them are already being mined, Wrench. Especially the old closed ones with lots of metal trash."_

 _"Dafuck? That sucks. When dey start doing dat? Iron and aluminum's easy but other stuff is harder if'n I can't get it from landfills."_

 _"How big is Big Lug going to be? Maybe we could have Golem get you the metal you need?" Dragon asked._

 _"The giant hand guy?" Wrench was quiet for a minute. "You get him, I got anudder way to make Big Lug."_

 _"I can get him." Dragon promised. "As long as you don't cause more problems."_

 _"Whatever. I'll ask next time I want shit other people trew away. The govmint always wants shit. Tell 'em if they leave me da fuck alone, and if I can get Golem's help, I'll dig tha Panama Canal to five hun'red meters wide, with four eight-lane highways under. I can get the iron, aluminum, silicon, and probly copper from that, but I need Golem for other stuff like platinum, gold, and graphene. Hope he can make good graphene. Dat'd be a real help. Gonna need lots of graphene and it's a copper-plated bitch to make right."_

 _Kongo interjected, quietly. "Uranium, Plutonium?"_

 _Nah. Govmint have kittens if I fueled a fifty petawatt nuclear reactor, even if it's thorium. I'll use a zero-point generator for Big Lug. Safer than fusion."_

Dragon was conspicuously silent.

That was when what Wrench said about the Panama Canal made me almost fell flat on my face in the water.

 _"Wait. You said five hundred meters wide? Or feet?"_

 _"I know metric, Fubuki. Big Lug'll be really big. I'll need a lot of iron. Got him planned for six k-em by four k-em, so he can haul enough rock and dirt to build the islands before I'm an old lady. I'll build him on the Pacific side, since he-"_

 _Dragon broke in. "The President of Panama very enthusiastically says yes, but you'll need to do a different route then the original canal. He wants to know when you plan on starting."_

 _Wrench hummed over the radio. "Tuesday after next? Take about a month ta finish, I think. Gotta redesign the New Man Von machines for canal and rock tunneling work instead of landfill mining. I'll have a couple in Tiny Tim ready to go when I arrive, but will need to tweak them after I get there."_

 _"Von Newmann." Dragon corrected._

 _"Yeah. That. Whateva." Wrench replied. I was certain she was trolling Dragon._

 _"Weapons. Don't build them, Wrench. If you did build them, make them go away now, before they get to Dinah and start asking her questions.."_

 _There was a heavy sigh. "Yeah. Figgered. But anything dat cuts rock can hurt people. Someone wants to say I made weapons, they can point at the rock cutters."_

 _Dragon spoke again, in a careful tone. "Understood. You'll just have to make larger machines instead of little ones, so they are less mobile. I'm getting a lot of pressure to monitor all your vehicles directly, Wrench, with overrides."_

 _Another heavy sigh. "Figgered that too. Dey put two n two together, 'membered who I wuz, 'n put me on the crazy crackhead ho with daisy dukes S-class tinker list, right?"_

 _Dragon sighed. "Not quite those words. But what you did last night, just got you re-classed as a Tinker 10, with S-class threat potential. You have a bunch of people very worried right now that you might be another Nilbog, except with machines."_

 _"Wish I coulda done dat, years back." Came the sad voice. "Dragon, I want ta visit the graveyard 'n say some g'byes 'fore I head to Panama. 'Dat gonna be a problem?"_

 _Dragon's voice was resonant, and rock solid. "No, Wrench. It will not be a problem. I'll make certain."_

* * *

** End of Flashback

I looked towards the coastline. "Wrench has been even more on edge ever since Dragon installed interfaces on the equipment to monitor and shut things down if necessary. You know how she is about her machines."

Kongo nodded.

"She had another idea though."

"Something more feasible?"

"Guided munitions, supplemental generators, and kinetic screens. She probably has other ideas as well. Equipment that could simply be discarded if it couldn't be serviced back home."

Kongo dipped her head and stared at the water below us. "You know that it'll probably itch like mad, right? All upgrades do. I suspect Wrench's upgrades might be even worse than normal.

I nodded. "If she can even give us a little taste of this technology, and we can get it home?" I met Kongo's eyes. "I was very tempted to say yes to a complete refit, no matter what the risk night be for the future. Could you even imagine-"

A strong hand rested on the top of my head, briefly, and then patted twice before Kongo spoke "Oh, yes. I know exactly what you were thinking. If I knew that what Wrench could do would even work in our dimension, I'd have been all over it." She sighed. "She said she could make me fly, Fubuki. Could you imagine the fairy pilot's reactions to that?"

We both laughed for almost a full minute, making confused fairy pilot noises at each other.

"I'm going to do a one hour patrol, Fubuki. Need to stretch my legs."

"Understood. Fifteen minute checks?"

Kongo nodded, and I set my smartphone, as well as my internal timer, to repeat a fifteen minute countdown.

Before she turned to go back to the back of the ship where the water access elevator was, Kongo quietly said "Yes. I will agree to removable modifications and munitions, but I need to know what they are, first."

Then I leaned against the railing and looked down. There were humpback whales playing in the waves.

Grinning, I pulled out the smartphone again, and recorded them for a little while. If you didn't know the shape of the whale bodies, they looked like dolphin along the bow of a normal-sized ship

 _Big Lug_ drafted nearly two hundred meters, and it was fifty meters to the water from the deck. Despite that, he was so wide and long that he looked more like a pointy-nosed barge than a ship. There was no port big enough for him. And that wasn't even the most amazing part. We were only moving at five knots so we wouldn't cause tsunamis. Wrench claimed the ship could make twenty knots fully loaded. Which was simply mind-blowing. It didn't even have propellers. It used electricity to accelerate water in tubes from the bow of the ship to the stern. Dragon called it a magnetohydrodynamic drive. Wrench called it an electric squirtgun. I called it amazing.

I sent the video to Wrench, Imp, Dragon, and Kongo, and, after a few seconds, decided to send it to Youtube as well. Dragon had made us an account, and I'd been put in charge of uploading videos. Wrench was not allowed to respond to the trolls, the first video had been pretty ugly.

The fact that so many people were refusing to believe _Big Lug_ was real was more funny than annoying. I was riding on the ship, and sometimes I had a hard time believing it was real. And I had a lot more real world knowledge about ships than almost all of the armchair admirals on Youtube.

An hour later, Kongo was back, and we went to go eat dinner with Imp and Wrench.

* * *

** After Dinner

Imp stared at Kongo over her mostly-finished three-scoop banana split. "I don't care how many times I see it, I'm jealous. Every time."

Kongo smiled over her _second_ gallon bucket of rocky road ice cream. "My metabolism is a wee bit more energetic than yours."

Pouting, Imp looked at me. "Even you. That's so not fair."

I was nearly finished with my gallon of orange sherbet and vanilla ice cream swirl. I scraped the spoon to get some of the last bits and saucily stuck it in my mouth. "Life's not fair, Imp."

A cherry hit me in the middle of my forehead.

"You did not just do that." I loaded up my spoon and prepared to fire.

Wrench leaned back in her chair, giving me a stern look. "Last time dis happened, I got an ice cream facial."

"Because she hid behind you." I said, in mock outrage.

"An' I don' know she's there."

"I can't remember to stay visible when people are shooting at me." Imp tried to defend herself.

"But you can remember to hide behind me? It ice cream, Imp." Wrench said in a schoolteacher tone.

"Being shot out of a heavy steel spoon by a brute five." She looked at Kongo. "Or seven." Imp narrowed her eyes. "You've been on the receiving end of these two ice cream cannoneers. Why are you-"

The blob of strawberry ice cream shot out from behind Wrench's sundae at a high rate of speed, and hit Imp in the right cheek.

Wrench didn't react to the direct hit she had scored. She stared at how she was holding her spoon, shrugged, adjusted the spoon in her hand, and then scooped out another bite.

Imp grinned at me and Kongo. "Ice cream discipline for the win."

Wrench paused mid-bite. "What?" Her head turned suddenly, slightly, lining up to look at Imp.

Imp started slowly wiping strawberry ice cream off her cheek with her finger and eating it.

Wrench looked at Imp, then at her strawberry ice cream. Then at everyone else's non-strawberry ice cream before she smiled at Imp. "I bet ya deserved it."

Kongo and I both nodded energetically, and everyone broke out laughing, including Wrench.

 _Mission accomplished._

* * *

** The next day

Kongo and I were out testing our new kinetic screens, throwing rocks at each other, because we sure weren't going to test with live ammo. We'd each given up two AA mounts for one zero point power generator and one kinetic field generator. Wrench said the power generator generated a lot more power than our boilers, which was mind-boggling.

The kinetic field would not stop main battery shells from a battleship, and it didn't go underwater to protect us from torpedoes but she was confident that no bomb and no direct fire from any World War Two naval gun less than ten inches would penetrate the field. All in all, Kongo and I were thrilled with the shields.

The guided munitions were potentially very effective, but a little annoying. Normally, you fired a torpedo or a gun, and that was it. Fire and forget. Having to pay attention while the torp or the shell was on the way was weird. In a high stress combat scenario I had my doubts about how long I could watch my torps on the way to target? Splitting attention in a fight was not good. Did I trust the kinetic shield that much?

 _Still, even if I only guide them briefly before cutting them loose, that's a better hit probability._

* * *

** Another day later

My phone rang. It was a conference request. I accepted it, and I saw Kongo pulling her phone out as well.

 _If we do go home, I'm going to be so lost without a smartphone._

"Fubuki, Kongo, I think they found another shipgirl."

"Wait. What? Say that again," I replied to Dragon.

"Who is she?" Kongo asked.

"She's unresponsive to stimuli, breathing and maintaining a normal human body temperature, but not moving. A fisherman found her in the surf on the coast of Akutan Island. Figured she was dead, but wanted to get her somewhere before a polar bear got to her. He couldn't even budge her with a tow rope from his boat. So he called the Anchorage team. They are busy, so the call transferred to me."

 _Akutan_

Kongo and I looked at each other.

I swallowed. "What does she look like?"

"Early teens. Slender. Albino skin. White hair. She's wearing a white smock over a black bikini. Black and orange ankle and wrist bangles. Also, a really heavy metal black necklace. I'm sending a remote now, and should be able to get pictures to you soon."

I looked at Kongo and swallowed. There were only two of us, and no air support.

Kongo snapped out. "This is critical. Does she have a plushie plane that looks like an A6M Zero?"

Dragon paused a moment. "Like the one that crash landed there in World War 2? I'll ask the fisherman. His phone doesn't have a camera."

A moment later, Dragon spoke again. "No stuffed plane."

 _Damn._

"This is deadly serious, Dragon. You must bring an A6M Zero plushie to her. If she wakes without one, she'll go ballistic."

"Is this important enough and dangerous enough that I should call in other capes? I can get Parian a picture of a Zero, and maybe get Valkyrie to help me transport it-"

"Yes!" Kongo and I replied at the same time.

"I see. Moving the Zero Plushie to the top of my priority list. Tell me more."

I started talking. Kongo was listening closely, but letting me speak. "First, get that fisherman away from there, evacuate the island, and try to keep all ships and planes at least fifty miles away. Two hundred would be better."

Dragon spoke slowly. "I need you two to make sense. You are acting like you know this individual. You seem afraid of her. You are urging us to evacuate. The fisherman is telling me that I'm insane if I think he's going to leave a girl to be eaten by the bears, even if she's a cape. He's called friends to help him come move the girl." She paused. "And you are telling me to bring her a plane plushie like it's going to make all the problems go away."

"An A6M Zero plushie. It's got to be an A6M. She'll reject other models." I corrected her.

"That is not an answer, but I will get a very good historically accurate image to Parian." Dragon sounded impatient.

Kongo spoke. "She's not a shipgirl. She's an Abyssal - an island princess. Her name is Hoppo. She's... different from other Abyssals. You can normally bribe her to leave you alone, with plushie A6M's."

"What threat levels?"

I looked at Kongo and licked my lips nervously while I tried to calculate threat levels the way capes did. "If she gets violent, she could sink Kongo and me easily. An island princess normally takes six ships to defeat, at least two of them carriers. She can regenerate even if she's killed. Brute eight or nine, Blaster seven or eight. Probably higher"

Dragon replied after a second. "So. Anything I should say when I offer her the plushie?"


	7. Chapter 7

"Dragon, I'm not sure that's a good idea."

"Fubuki, I can see evidence of at least a dozen wounds that would have killed a human of her size and build, but she's healing rapidly, and completely, without scars. If there's any sort of similarity between her biology and humans, she's probably going to wake soon. I think it would be best if I were here when she wakes."

 _It would be best if Kongo and I were there to back you up._ I thought, a little angrily, but settled for a different comment. "It would be better if nobody was there. Hoppo may sometimes seem childish, cute, and sometimes even nice, but she's still an Abyssal island princess. You're risking your life to be next to her when she wakes."

"No. I'm not. Remember what I am, Fubuki. My remote is no more alive than the plushie zero I had Parian make." Dragon replied, calmly.

 _I keep forgetting that her remote isn't actually her._

"Sorry. You're right. I'm treating you as if your remote was a shipgirl."

"No offense taken, Fubuki." Dragon paused. "Also, these fishermen will not leave if I don't stay. They know who I am and trust me to stay here to protect the girl from polar bears."

"She's-"

"Not a girl, I know, but humans are wired to be protective of children, and she looks like a barely adolescent girl. You're human enough to feel that. I've seen both you and Kongo around kids."

"Fine. No more argument from me." I turned to look at Kongo, who was pacing back and forth behind me. "Kongo?"

"Dragon's remote is a valuable resource, but the information she can give us by being there when Hoppo wakes is potentially worth the risk. If Hoppo wakes violently, Dragon's remote will take the brunt. And we'll be more prepared."

I stared at Kongo. "More prepared for what? We can't deal with an island princess with just the two of us, even if she has no planes. I've seen Hoppo shrug off point-blank broadsides from Yamato, and neither of us comes close to her firepower. Hoppo could tear us apart like confetti."

Kongo nodded, but before she could respond, Wrench cut into the conversation. "Dragon, you got backup on de way?"

The image of the remote on the screen turned slightly to face Wrench. "Yes. Slowly and not very enthusiastically. The rest of the cape community isn't quite willing to believe something that looks like Hoppo is an S-class threat that is potentially almost as dangerous as an Endbringer. Most of them don't understand that Fubuki and Kongo aren't capes."

Wrench turned on her heel and walked back towards one of her waldo tanks. "Fine. I'll be workin' on puttin weapons on diggers, if dat's OK, Dragon. I want somethin' to fight wid, if the girl is in a bad mood and as tuff as Fubuki and Kongo say she is." Something in her voice made it very clear that it really didn't matter if Dragon gave her permission, or not.

"As long as you leave the control modules installed, that's fine, Wrench."

Wrench made a huffing noise but said nothing as she inserted her arms into a Waldo tank and pressed her face against the eyepieces.

Dragon's metallic head stared at Wrench from the screen for a moment, then her chrome eyes cut to me. "Hoppo is mimicking human physiology like you do. How human is she in how she reacts to others?"

Kongo and I looked at each other. "That's hard to say, Dragon. Shipgirls don't exactly socialize with Hoppo. We avoid her when possible, bribe her when we can't stay out of her range, and fight her if necessary. She's more human than any of the other Abyssals and always has been, even seeming to have emotions other than hate. Still, we can't trust her, and she certainly won't trust us. She's the enemy. Kongo and I have both been involved in operations to destroy her bases."

Dragon stared back at me. "You've fought her directly? She will know you?"

Kongo and I both nodded.

"I'm living in interesting times, it seems," Dragon spoke as she turned away from the drone she was using to communicate with us. Then she turned back towards us again. "To you, she's the enemy. Are you sure she will be the enemy here, to us?"

"She's an Abyssal," Kongo stated flatly. "They killed billions directly and indirectly on our world before there were enough shipgirls to effectively defend against them. They still kill hundreds of thousands of men, women, and children every year on our world despite our efforts. She might be cute, but she's the enemy. If I were you, I would be calling in favors to get a lot of capes here as soon as possible."

I nodded. There was nothing I could add to Kongo's statement.

Dragon turned away from the camera again. "Well, it seems as if our sleeping beauty is stirring." Dragon raised the foot-long, incredibly detailed stuffed A6M Zero Parian had made with one hand. "I hope she is in a good mood, and the gift pacifies her. If there isn't any violence, I expect you to stay away. If there is violence, I'll be in touch and we can bring you into the forces we will fight her with. I've already prepped a new remote to replace this one if necessary."

Kongo stared at the screen. "You realize that if she wakes, even if she doesn't fight you, she will take over the island and the humans will have to move. That's the best case scenario. Abyssals don't share."

Dragon paused briefly but didn't turn to face us, only turning her head very slightly so we could see one of her eyes. "That's a bridge we'll cross if we need to. It's our world, we'll try it my way first, Kongo."

Kongo's eyes narrowed again as she crossed her arms.

I tried to keep my face impassive as I realized Dragon didn't trust us to not attack Hoppo.

 _That's why she didn't let us come support her._

Kongo and I both looked at each other. Dragon didn't look back at us, but that was a conversational fiction. Dragon didn't need her remote's eyes to face the camera drone to see us, just like we didn't need our eyes to see with radar.

I shook my head slightly, and Kongo shrugged. Sometimes it was highly annoying when it became obvious Dragon was intentionally using artificial human body language. Then again, it was creepy when she didn't use human body language. She did that fairly frequently when Wrench was being difficult.

As far as I could tell, Wrench didn't seem to understand what Dragon was doing with the lack of body language in those conversations, and I had allowed Dragon to keep her little secret. Most of the time we tended to agree with Dragon. Wrench was frequently a loose cannon, and keeping her mentally a little off balance was sometimes for the best when she was in a bad mood.

 _Not this time. Hoppo is too dangerous. Right now I'm very much regretting not taking her up on the offer of a full refit._

Dragon's camera remote suddenly moved a little higher in the air so it could look down on the rocky beach. The area around the small albino girl was heavily trenched and littered with broken tools, chains, and ropes. The human fishermen and Dragon had put a lot of effort into trying to move her away from the water. Despite the fact that Dragon's remote was strong enough to lift several tons, they hadn't even been able to budge one of Hoppo's fingers.

 _And that's when she's unconscious._

I shook my head and watched the scene intently. Hoppo was shifting a little on the ground, as if she was sleeping uncomfortably. It was the first time I'd seen her move in the several hours since Dragon arrived on the beach with the stuffed A6M Zero.

Dragon crouched, motionless, slightly outside the possible sweeping arc of Hoppo's legs, holding the plushie plane in full view. And then she spoke.

"I know you're awake, and paying close attention to me, little one. I can read your body language. I mean you no harm."

Hoppo stiffened slightly, and her eyes popped open. Her milk white albino face suddenly erupted with huge, bright orange pupils framed by red eyebrows. The bright eyes locked onto Dragon's crouched form.

Slowly and carefully, Dragon held out the stuffed Zero towards Hoppo, who made no move to accept it.

Hoppo's eyes shifted to the plane, then back to Dragon. Her eyes darted back and forth, apparently examining Dragon's impressive mechanical body.

Suddenly, the Island Princess spoke. "That's not mine." Her voice grew harsh and she pushed her arms behind her and sat. "I lost mine."

Dragon didn't move, except to hold out the toy by its tail, the nose of the plane extended, at arm's length, but not crowding the girl. "It's a gift. Please accept it."

Hoppo's expression grew troubled, and she stared at the stuffed plane. Her right hand twitched, and reached out, almost as if she weren't in control of her own limb. Then the hand stopped, motionless.

Dragon didn't move, except to twitch the plane slightly. When Hoppo didn't take the plane, she asked. "Are you hungry?"

"Dragon, she should have taken the plane by now," I whispered.

"Either that or attacked," Kongo added. "Hoppo makes decisions quickly."

Dragon's reply was radio only, her body language did not change in the slightest. "She's upset and thinking. I can see that much. She really does seem very human in her responses."

As the three of us conversed, Hoppo's eyes narrowed. Her gaze shifted to look directly at the camera, and then back to Dragon.

As Hoppo leaned forward slowly, reaching out with her right hand for the plane, Dragon extended her left arm holding the toy a little more.

When Hoppo's hand touched the plane, her body exploded into motion as she pushed herself off the ground with her left hand and struck like a snake with her right.

Dragon didn't even try to dodge as the island princess's right hand slipped past the plane and gripped her left wrist. She just looked at Hoppo. "I wasn't going anywhere, little one, but you're welcome to ask me questions."

"This is bad, Kongo," I muttered.

Kongo nodded, arms crossed. "She didn't say 'reppu' or take the plane. Dragon, you should be ready to abandon that remote. She's probably going to destroy it and begin fortifying the island."

Hoppo slowly stood, staring at Dragon, and the camera remote, and she muttered, barely audibly. "So jagged." Her eyes snapped to Dragon's face, now a little below her own, as Dragon had remained crouched. "What code is that? How do you make radio do that?"

"It's not a code. It's digital signals. Like Morse code. The radio you know is analog. I can explain how digital radio works, but it will take time. Did you want food?"

Hoppo's head turned as she slowly scanned the land around her. "I hear human music on analog radio and understand it, so not everyone uses this digital radio you speak about. Then I hear you using jagged radio, and your flying machine behind you is also using jagged radio." She paused. "You were talking to someone, and I couldn't understand."

"I was. We found you a few hours ago. I've come here to wait for you to wake, and offer assistance."

"And you offered me a reppu," Hoppo whispered as her head swiveled from the camera remote to Dragon's face. I heard the sound of metal squealing as Hoppo leaned closer to Dragon's still-crouched form.

"Please do not damage my wrist any further, little one. I mean you no harm."

Hoppo cocked her head slightly and spoke intently as her eyes grew brighter. "How did you know?"

Kongo slapped the side of her head withher left hand and muttered "The zero. She knows someone is here who knows her."

"Indeed. But she's still thinking. I'm not going to mention you." Dragon reassured us.

"She's never been this perceptive and analytical before. Cunning, yes." I advised. "She also doesn't talk like Hoppo normally does."

"Did either of you change personalities when you crossed over?"

"No," I replied firmly. Then I paused and looked at Kongo, "At least Kongo hasn't that I can remember."

"You're the same, Bucky," Kongo replied.

Hoppo's voice cut through our conversation. "You're still talking to someone on the radio. In the jagged... digital. Are they the ones that told you to try to bribe me with a reppu?" She paused. "The signal originates from nearly a thousand miles to the southeast, moving at around six to eight knots in this direction."

"Yes. I am speaking with people who are that far away, in that direction." Dragon affirmed.

"I think you are lying." Hoppo stared at Dragon's remote. "I can tell there is nothing alive in this metal shell. You are probably on that ship in the ocean moving this way."

Dragon's remote suddenly stood, and wobbled back and forth.

Hoppo stared at the mechanical body as it stood. "Incredibly complex. Such tiny parts. Your artificial woman is almost beyond my ability to control."

She small albino girl waved at the camera with her left hand. The machine zipped over next to her, and she examined it with narrow eyes. "I understand this a little better. Cruder parts. Lenses. Transmitters. Receivers. You are using it as a signal relay, but I can't understand what's making it fly." Hoppo continued muttering to herself as she alternately stared at the camera drone and Dragon's remote.

"I would have appreciated it if you had told me she could commandeer mechanical systems." Dragon sounded a little annoyed. "At least she hasn't commandeered the electrical systems, though I have no idea how she's bypassing all the control electronics to operate the drone and remote."

"We didn't know she could," I replied in shock. "I've never heard of Abyssals doing this."

Kongo started pacing beside me. Three steps forward, spin, three steps back the other way, spin. "Humans with mechanical ships and equipment rarely survived contact with Abyssals. This might be part of the reason why. What worries me more is that this is not the Hoppo I've bribed with chocolate scones and stuffed planes." Kongo whispered. "Something has changed her, and if she decides to be violent, she's probably going to be far more dangerous."

"I can tell you have analog receivers and transmitters in the mechanical body. Use them. In the clear." Hoppo commanded. "If you do not, I will assume you are planning to kill me. You can have control over the speakers again, to communicate with me."

"Understood, Hoppo. Please give me a moment to reconfigure some of the electronics. I will need to do so digitally, for several seconds."

"You have ten seconds."

"I need thirty. I have to make many changes."

Hoppo stared at the remote and nodded. "Thirty seconds then."

"At least she's not able to leave the island," I muttered.

Dragon spoke quickly to us. "I'm cutting off your ability to send signal to that remote. I'm also moving my code to a more secure remote in case Hoppo decides to smash it. I don't want to wait to restore from backup."

"Understood." I nodded.

"Testing. One. Two." Dragon spoke to Hoppo.

The island princess nodded. "I can hear you, audio and radio."

 _It's so frustrating to be unable to do anything except watch._

I looked over at Kongo, who was staring at the screen, biting her lower lip, arms crossed.

 _I'm not the only one._

"You did not answer me earlier. Answer me now. How did you know to give me a Reppu?"

"We have divination magic here, that allows brief glimpses of the future." Dragon lied.

Hoppo sniffed the air like an animal, for several seconds. It was almost comical. Then she replied with a growl. "No, you do not. There is not enough background magic in this place to support a divination here. Especially with me being wounded so badly." She paused and started sniffing again. "In fact, there's so little background magic on this world that what I'm drawing in to heal is letting me detect a trace of a magic signature that should not be here," She growled. "Shipgirls. The shipgirl magic is coming from the same direction as your radio signal. You're working with them. Scouting this place, preparing to attack me."

"No." Dragon denied the accusation, with a firm but not loud voice.

"Why else would shipgirls be here?" Hoppo shouted angrily. "How many are there? What ship types?"

"We do not want to fight you."

"If I don't start getting answers, you will be fighting me. I will not allow-" Hoppo cut herself off with a snap of her mouth and a shake of her head as her tone screeched towards fearful hysteria.

Dragon spoke calmly, but firmly. "The people that used to live here have been taken out of your range, and we're prepared to allow you to sit here and be alone if you won't be civil."

Hoppo growled. "The shipgirls you are working with know less than they think they do about what I am now." She stepped into the surf, and her black iron rigging appeared, studded with artillery barrels, chains, and huge mouths dripping with what people from this world might hope was red paint.

Dragon's remote and camera drone flew behind Hoppo as she skated across the waves, headed directly southeast, towards Big Lug, shouting angrily as she plowed through the waves. "I am no longer an Abyssal slave! Nor am I physically and mentally bound." Her voice raised to an even more shrill scream. "I paid too high a price for my freedom! You will give me answers, or I will come and force them from you!"

Kongo and I both stared at the screen, speechless.

Imp looked up at the two of us from the seat where she'd been watching the screen while drinking a cup of cocoa, and spoke quietly. "This is an 'Oh Shit' moment, right?"


	8. Chapter 8

"Turning Big Lug 'round, but can't outrun her." Wrench commented from next to her waldo tank. "I ain't gonna be much good 'gainst her without alot more time."

"What?" I turned to Wrench. "Dragon said you could make weapons! We're going to need a lot of weapons, Wrench!"

"No. Little cracker just took over Dragon's remote. She do the same to Big Lug or anything else I make, I bet. I makin' long range weapons, but don't know the little crack-"

Wrench winced. "Girl. Don't know girl's range. If she c'n control machines line o'sight, I be jus' about useless."

"Oh," I responded cleverly while looking over at Kongo, who was staring at the screen, watching Hoppo.

"Everything in this world seems to be terrible kabuki." Kongo tapped her finger against her jaw. "It seems as if we now get to play the part of the brave samurai, sacrificing ourselves to allow Wrench and Imp to escape the unstoppable enemy."

"Stop that, Kongo. We need to be serious."

Kongo turned and looked down at me. "I am serious, Bucky. We can't stop her, but we might be able to distract her long enough for Wrench to get the ship far enough away to escape." Kongo turned to Wrench. "You'll need to go radio silent. We'll need to leave the ship immediately."

Dragon broke into the conversation. "I've been patient with you two, but I need to put my foot down now. I need real answers."

 _What?_

Kongo stiffened, then cut her eyes at me and nodded, a fractional dip of her chin.

I stared back at her for at least three seconds, until she grinned back at me. "I'll talk to our upset friend if you want, Bucky."

Shaking my head, I imagined how quickly Kongo might get upset if her professional decisions were questioned by someone who wasn't an admiral. "No, that's fine Kongo, but please don't be silent. I don't think I can have this conversation entirely on my own."

Dragon spoke in a patient, but crisp tone. "I'm not upset, Kongo, but I'm not very happy with the intelligence you've provided either."

"That makes three of us," I muttered. "That's Hoppo, but at the same time, it's not."

"Fine. She's changed. But you haven't. Discrepancy. Any idea why?"

"None," I replied.

Kongo crossed her arms and shook her head as well.

"Does she have any other abilities that it might be good to know about?" There was irritation in Dragon's voice, something I couldn't remember hearing before.

"We didn't know she could commandeer machines, or leave her island, Dragon. I've never heard of her or any other island princess being able to do that. The humans on our world fought them with machines, but died by the tens of millions. As far as we know, human machines never killed a single abyssal. That was before our summoning. All we know is that human weapons don't work against Abyssals. We are the only thing that can stand against them on our world. And even we can't permanently kill them. They eventually come back."

"How do you fight them?"

"We shoot them until they sink," Kongo said, flatly.

"Not always." Dragon snapped back. "You already said you've bribed Hoppo with scones and stuffed animals, but that wasn't what I meant. You are part machine. Why doesn't she just take you over like she did my remote?"

Kongo's eyebrows raised, momentarily, her chin dropped a little, and she seemed deep in thought.

"Hoppo has always been different, as long as we've known about her." I started.

Imp coughed, and raised her right hand into the air, index finger extended and said "Bibbity Bobbity Boo. It's maaagic. Even Wrench here gets headaches when working with these two, Dragon."

"I don't." Wrench protested.

Imp tilted her head and looked back towards Wrench's waldo station. "Save it for someone who doesn't know what a thinker headache looks like. You might be a tinker and not a thinker, but a headache is a headache, and I lived with Tattletale long enough to know the signs."

There was no reply from Wrench. I didn't expect one. After a moment of silence, I continued. "Imp is probably right. We're spirits and machines, Dragon. We're summoned, not built."

"And you cannot control machines like she can?" Dragon asked.

"No. We can control our rigs like they are a part of us, but any other machines, we have to control like humans do."

"What about people with powers?" Imp asked. "Are our powers magical?"

"Apparently mine aren't," Dragon replied. "Like Wrench said earlier, I'm definitely against getting any sort of tinker weapons anywhere near her, and if Defiant even tries to join us I'm going to kick him into another dimension. Literally."

"We're going to need a lot more firepower than what Kongo and I have. You're going to need to bring at least a dozen capes with the ability to do damage at least on par with Kongo to have any hope of stopping her."

"I could probably get Legend or Valkyrie to beat her into submission, but I don't think that's what the situation calls for here."

I stared at the screen, even though there was no image of Dragon there, that was where her voice was coming from. "She's a _mobile_ island princess, Dragon. She can go from major city to major city and kill billions, all by herself." I whispered. "This isn't the Hoppo we thought we knew. She seems as bad as any other island princess now. How is there any other solution other than killing her if you can?

Wrench's voice from the back of the room again. "Girl was a slave. Said she escaped." Her voice grew hard. "Couple hundred years ago, my family was slaves. Great gramma told stories. People died when her granpa escaped, that he got blood on his hands. Not all of it was cracker slavemasters."

Kongo raised her voice. "She's already free. She _says._ And what is she doing now?"

I put my right hand on Kongo's left forearm, squeezing gently.

She looked down at me, shook her head slightly, frowned, and said "Sorry."

I squeezed her arm again, gently. "Nothing to be sorry about, Kongo It's a good point. She's free, and she immediately goes on the offensive."

"You've been her enemies for how long? I don't have any idea how she got here, but she probably was hoping to have escaped cleanly. And then I walk up and offer her a toy that made it perfectly clear that at least some peoplewho know her know she's here." Dragon paused. "How would you react?"

"Retreat, regroup, repair, resupply." I snapped out. "Provided that there was nothing that needed to be defended."

"But you are a destroyer, Fubuki," Dragon spoke gently. "What about you, Kongo? You would be more aggressive, wouldn't you?"

Kongo nodded. "Yes. Retreat is frequently not a good option for slower shipgirls. That's why contingency planning is needed. If everything goes upside down, sometimes the best choice is to do as much damage as possible, to allow others to escape. Even for smaller ships, if they are on escort duty or protecting civilians." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "I saw it firsthand off Samar when Taffy 3 turned into our teeth and fought like demons."

Dragon began speaking in a measured, logical tone. "It doesn't sound like Hoppo could ever retreat before. You said she wouldn't be able to move away from the island, but she's making about twenty knots right now. She's angry, confused, and still in pain. If she's never been able to chase after her enemies before, the fact that she can now might make that option seem much more attractive."

That logic didn't quite hold up. "She's so much more intelligent sounding and clever now, less childish. Are you saying that she's coming after us because she can, and that's the only thing she can think of to do?"

"I don't know." Dragon paused. "She seems to think a lot like a human. Even the smartest humans are frighteningly irrational at times. I don't know anything for sure other than the fact that I've put her on the S-class cape list and provided her known abilities. I don't know what other abilities she might have, and neither do you, apparently." Dragon paused. "She detected you from nearly a thousand miles away, apparently 'smelling' your magic scent somehow. It seems like there isn't much magic here, compared to where you came from."

 _Which means that hiding from her might be impossible here, on this world._

 _I see what she's angling for, and she's right._

I looked at Kongo, who was staring at the screen where Dragon's voice was coming from.

"Fine. I'll go intercept her. See if she'll talk. Try to defuse her anger."

Kongo spun to face me. "No."

"Yes. I'm no threat to her. I'm faster than you, more maneuverable. I might be able to escape her if she attacks."

Kongo raised both her hands rapidly into the air in a gesture of irritation. "She's already so much different from the Hoppo we know, Bucky. We should retreat, regroup, and return with this world's most powerful capes. Deal with her, and then contain her when she's weakened."

Dragon's voice interrupted us. "I'm not sure we can, Kongo. You've said in the past that Abyssals can't die. She can control non-magical machines. She's immensely physically powerful. You've also mentioned that island princesses can manipulate the reality of their islands. All that adds up to an enormous question mark."

"I will go with you." Kongo insisted, ignoring Dragon's comments.

I shook my head. "If she attacks, I have a better chance of escaping. She might even see you as being a threat. You are a battleship. I'm just a destroyer." I paused. "If I'm destroyed, you know more about Abyssals than I do, have fought them longer, and can provide more insight on tactics than I can. You know all this to be true."

"But."

"No buts, Kongo. You know I'm right."

Kongo's eyes closed and she took a deep breath. "You will return. It would be unacceptable for a battleship to be unescorted. Terrible kabuki." She quickly leaned forward and trapped me in a bear hug and kissed my forehead before releasing me and mussing my hair with her hand.

I glared at her as I combed out my hair with one hand. "I'll do my best."

"You always do." Kongo turned towards the screen where Dragons voice had been coming from, which was now showing only Hoppo, skating across the waves with a determined look on her face. "If anything... permanent happens to Fubuki-"

I smacked her arm, hard, before she could finish the sentence. "You will not threaten allies! I am choosing to take on this mission!"

Kongo's head swiveled to me like a turret, and her eyes bored into mine, briefly. "Of course, Fubuki, you are correct." She turned back to the screen, and her eyes flickered over the image of Hoppo. "I apologize, Dragon."

"There's no reason to apologize, Kongo. I understand what it means to have friends."

"Good. Then we understand each other." Kongo looked from the screen to me, and then back.

 _Just what I need to worry about. Kongo attacking allies because I wouldn't let her die with me if things go bad. Even if she doesn't kill them, she'll be dishonored and likely not be able to fight with clarity when Hoppo is opposed. Then she'll likely do something foolish and try to get herself killed._

I added that to the list of things in my mind that success would prevent.

Failure is never an acceptable outcome, but failing to calm Hoppo down could potentially lead to billions of dead humans, and the end of many people I considered friends. Perhaps even disgraceful ends if Kongo grew too emotional over my death.

 _I will not-_

 _No, I cannot fail._

* * *

"Sure you don' want 'em back?"

"I'm sure, Wrench. There's no telling what might happen if Hoppo can control the upgrades you gave me. She might be able to remotely detonate the generators and end me with a thought. Without the generators, none of the rest will work."

Wrench nodded. "Guess it better you know now about the little cracker witch controlling machines, rather than finding out too late."

"Wrench. Why are you calling Hoppo a cracker?"

"She's white. Really white. She's also comin' here and ain't friendly."

"Just abandon-"

Wrench cut me off with a wave in front of her face. "No. I got purpose now. Ain't giving up squat. Little cracker tries t' take my ship, she won' like it one bit. Dragon said she can't control electronics. I c'n use that."

"I'm not sure it's that easy, Wrench."

"Then I die, or whatever." She paused. "Sometimes things are worth dying for, you know?"

"I know. And sometimes people are willing to die because they are afraid to fail." I paused. "But if you fail, you can try again. Dying is a bit more final."

"'Nuff psychobabble from you, little miss perfect." Wrench growled as she stalked away from me, the upgrades she had provided earlier now stored in a satchel hanging from her shoulder. "I done thought this out. You'll stop the crack... witch 'fore she gets here. If not, then I will."

I sighed as I stared at her back.

 _So impossible to deal with. Such incredible potential._

Imp and Kongo were waiting at the access ramp.

"Wish I could go with." Imp looked at me. "If my power works against her."

I shook my head. "We can see you. Hoppo probably can too."

"Other than walking on water and having big metal backpacks, you two don't seem a lot like Hoppo."

"If there is a fight, Imp, what are you going to be able to do to her?"

"Cut her." Imp raised a hilt in front of her face and pressed a button. A nanothorn blade emerged. Then she flicked it off and hesitated, holding the hilt out a little in front of her for a few seconds, apparently offering it to me before she put it back in its sheath. "I got it from Defiant a couple years ago. I just called him. He says that it might have enough power to blind her, or cut open an artery."

I did not mention the other problems Imp would have in a fight with Hoppo. Not being able to fly or stand on water being the most obvious. No doubt Imp knew that. It was pretty clear that what she had been doing was offering me the knife, but if it was only good for one wound at knife fighting range, it would make no difference.

"I'd never get that close to Hoppo in a fight, Imp, unless I was part of a very large task force with ships like Kongo to keep most of her attention." I gave her a quick bow. "Thank you for the offer."

"Going out on a mission alone is something I understand, Fubuki. Come back safe." Imp gave me a hug, then ruffled my hair.

 _What is it with tall people always ruffling my hair?_

I glared at Imp as I fixed my hair and approached the ramp. Kongo wasn't looking at me. She was staring out over the water.

"Kongo?" I whispered as I approached.

She continued staring out over the water. "I have been unprofessional. I have been an embarrassment."

I stopped and reached a hand up to her shoulder. "You have been a friend. You did not act on any of those regretful statements."

"Still." Kongo shifted her feet and raised her gaze to stare directly into the morning sun.

"Stop, Kongo. You remember as well as I do how strict the discipline was in the war before we were sunk. Back then, allowing friendship to come into a tactics discussion might have been a punishable offense for our officers and crew. But we aren't them. Blind obedience to rules didn't win the war for our country. It led to atrocities. You could even make the argument that it lost the war for us. Some of our officers and crew really weren't much better than Abyssals, especially when it came to our treatment of prisoners and those we defeated."

"I have given that much thought, but I still try to be professional in my interactions. I wish I had your self-control." Kongo spoke in a harsh whisper.

After a moment, I replied. "I wish I had your confidence."

"You have all of my confidence, Bucky. If anyone can do this, you can. You were right that it would be foolish for me to join you. Are you sure you won't try to just reach her by radio?"

"As far as I know, we've never had much luck dealing with Hoppo nonviolently by radio. If we didn't meet her, she would attack. The few times I dealt with her directly, she seemed hungry for interaction. I hope she will just talk. If not..." I shrugged. We both knew what the most probable outcome was for a destroyer in speaking range of an island princess if the island princess chose to attack.

"Yes." Kongo was silent for a moment, then reached behind her head with both hands, briefly, withdrawing a necklace and holding it out to me. "Take this omamori."

"Kongo, I..."

"Shush. I know you don't wear one. Please take mine, with my blessing. It is a small thing, but if it does truly offer protection, I want you to have it since I cannot be there."

I took the omamori on its braided leather necklace and put it around my neck, then tucked the charm down the front of my shirt to protect it from salt spray. "Thank you, Kongo."

We bowed to each other. Then I stepped off the ramp and went to three-quarter speed to meet Hoppo.

* * *

I was following the radio signals from Dragon's remote. She was still in communication with Hoppo through the suit that she couldn't control. Hoppo wasn't speaking very often.

I was using a big satellite phone and trying to get information from Dragon. We hoped that Hoppo couldn't intercept the transmission. "Is she angry, sullen, in pain? You can read human emotions, Dragon. Even if she's not talking, what's her mood? Don't send me into this blind."

I've been sending you the video, Fubuki. She's very determined, but also angry, afraid, confused, and in some pain. I'm not entirely certain that I'm reading her right. The fact that she can maintain such intense emotions for so long makes me uncertain that my observations are accurate. Hoppo has already surprised me too many times."

I stared at the phone. Dragon's words seemed like reasonable caution. No matter how little I liked it, I was in the dark, and would stay there until I arrived.

"Understood. Please keep sending me the video feed. Send me the earliest images you can of her wounds."

"Do you want reconstructions of what the wounds might have looked like when inflicted?"

"Yes, please," I replied.

A few moments later, I started receiving images of Hoppo laying on the beach, with dozens of mostly healed wounds. Shortly after that, I received pictures of Hoppo standing, showing the wounds that hadn't been visible before.

When Dragon's reconstructions of the original injuries arrived, I could only stare for several seconds before I managed to speak again. "How accurate is this, Dragon?"

"The reconstructions are simple. The shape and size anyway. The depth I can only guess at. Hoppo is denser than anything I've ever encountered short of an Endbringer, and I don't know the power of the weapons used."

I stared at the wounds. They were of a type I'd seen on many shipgirls, but rarely on an Abyssal.

"You seem surprised." Dragon's voice again.

I looked at the phone. "I am. I was not expecting this. She was mauled, horribly, and shipgirls don't create wounds like this." I touched what was obviously a bite mark to the meat of the upper thigh. "Most of our weapons are projectiles and explosives. A few of us carry melee weapons. None of us have the ability to make bite marks like that."

"She did say she had escaped slavery."

"She did. But how? Why is she the only one?"

"Looking at her, maybe she wasn't the only one, just the luckiest one?"

 _That's a sobering thought._

"And she escaped and ended up here. Maybe others have escaped and ended up elsewhere?"

"Maybe." I shook my head. "Dragon, why are you trying so hard to convince me Hoppo is a victim?"

There was a long pause before the careful, slow response. "Fubuki, have you ever been a slave or a victim of mistreatment?"

"No, I haven't." I stared at the screen, thinking furiously. Trying to remember everything I knew about Dragon.

There was a sigh, and Dragon's voice continued. "Be thankful that you have not. You can't understand, and I hope you never can. But I do understand. And I can see the signs in Hoppo."

 _Such an emotion-laden response. Is this Dragon manipulating me with social-fu, or..._

I shook my head. Dragon had proven herself to be a friend. She might be wrong, but she wasn't deceptive. It's not like I hadn't seen Abyssals strike out at each other before.

Another thought occurred to me. In all my memories of Hoppo, I could not remember her ever striking any members of her attendant fleet. Every other island princess I'd encountered had been very physically brutal with their attendant fleets, even to the point of crippling them when they appeared to make mistakes. I'd never considered that. I'd never had reason to.

 _Food for thought. But how does that help me here?_

"Thank you for the insight, Dragon."

"She's tracking you now, I think. Her heading is changing to meet yours. ETA to visual range about two hours."

"Thank you for the notice."

My hand moved without conscious thought to the spot on my blouse where the omamori Kongo had given me was resting against my skin. I'd never considered myself superstitious before, but I was about to come to speaking range with an island princess, which would put me so far into her gunnery range that escape would be nearly impossible despite my speed and size. If I had been meeting the Hoppo I knew like this, I would still be afraid, but this was worse. Much worse. This Hoppo was terrifying.

 _Terrifying duty is still duty._

"Signing off, Dragon."

"Roger, Fubuki. I'll be listening with the remote."

I turned off the phone and dropped it in the water. I didn't want to advertise that I'd been in communication with anyone else, and I had been radio silent with my onboard transmitters for hours.

As the big satellite phone sank into the water behind me, I spoke aloud, to myself. "Failure is not an option. Even if I don't know how to succeed."

I refused to contemplate how ridiculous that sounded.

* * *

Hoppo appeared about two hours later. It was definitely her finding me more than me finding her. Dragon's remote and camera drone were still in formation behind her, flying, but they were not transmitting.

We both approached each other at dead slow, with our turrets and my tubes turned out of line with each other. Not that such an arrangement would matter at point blank range. I'd die in twenty seconds as opposed to ten.

Hoppo glowered at me as we slowly circled each other. "I know you, Special Destroyer Fubuki. You can't be here."

"But I am here, though I don't know how. Kongo is also on this world."

Hoppo scanned the horizon. I felt the radar pulses. She sniffed the air.

"She did not come with me," I advised.

"You came alone? A single destroyer? How brave." Hoppo sneered.

I shrugged. "If you decide to fight, a destroyer and a fast battleship wouldn't be any more likely to defeat you than a destroyer alone."

Hoppo stared at me. "Does it bother you that you might have been sacrificed for nothing?"

"If I die here, then I die here, Hoppo. But I didn't come to fight." I shrugged, raised my forearms and twisted my wrists to hold both hands palm-up. "Your words and actions after you woke were recorded and I have witnessed them." I paused. "I see the partially healed wounds. The bites that no shipgirl could inflict on you. You are not the Hoppo I knew, but I think that you are Hoppo."

Bright orange irises framed by flame red eyebrows stared at me without blinking. "How did you get here?"

I briefly considered ignoring her question, but there was no operational security here. "Kongo was testing her boilers after yard service. I was escorting her. There was a sudden squall, and then we were here. Neither of us has any memory of any travel. We arrived in the middle of the Atlantic Ocean. This was several months ago."

"You were fifty miles northeast of Midway when you were caught in the storm. That's not a question."

Things started clicking in my head. "You were also in the storm? You've been laying on that beach, healing, for months?"

Hoppo stared at me for several seconds, before nodding, but said nothing.

"Why? How?"

Hoppo stiffened, her muscles pulling against her wounds. Blood dripped from not-quite-healed torn skin and muscle. "I failed them once too many times."

Her face contorted withrage. "Akagi, Yamato, several cruisers and a dozen destroyers were escorting a large convoy from Europe across the North Arctic, from Canada. I allowed them to pass in exchange for ice cream. It was witnessed by a controller."

"A what?"

Hoppo's voice cracked. "A controller. The same one that captured me and made me into this."

"I... see," I said, softly. I had never heard of a controller before.

"NO! YOU DO NOT!" Hoppo screamed suddenly. I jumped back several feet in the water, and Hoppo surged forward, jutting her face forward until she was nose to nose with me. She was panting, her eyes darting from side to side. Her rig's largest bloody mouth was hovering over her left shoulder, ready to strike. "You do not!" She whispered as she backed away from me. Her rig's mouth retracted to a less ready position.

I slowly, carefully, held my hands out in front of me, palms up, and gave a slight bow. "I would like to."

Hoppo's head tilted slightly. "You'll never get home, you know. It was me that brought you here. You were in the wrong place at the right time."

I staggered backward. "How?"

"I was trying to escape. Other Abyssal controllers were attempting to kill me."

"But. You can't die?"

Hoppo sneered. "You know so little. Even less than I did. Abyssals can die." Her voice dropped to a whisper. "The controller showed me how."

I was silent, motionless. Waiting while Hoppo stared into the air over my shoulder. I could see the sun as a tiny yellow dot reflected off the orange of her irises.

Hoppo stared intently at the sun for several seconds, then her eyes moved, pinning my eyes with hers. "He came to my island and summoned us to a meeting. Then, he commanded one of my patrol boats to approach him." She slashed her hand between us. "A debilitating blow was followed by a spell, and I watched as my patrol boat ceased to exist, it's essence consumed by the controller."

"That-"

"SHUT UP!" Hoppo screamed, pointing her guns at me.

I nodded slowly, raised my hands slightly, and shut up.

Eventually, after several seconds, Hoppo relaxed, her guns stopped tracking me, and she started to speak again, her voice crackling with anger. "Then. Then, while I was still stunned in disbelief, he turned and struck me to the ground, a crippling blow. He commanded my own attendant fleet to attack me while I was crippled. He told them that if they did not weaken me sufficiently to knock me unconscious so he could drain my life essence, he would kill them, and then kill me himself."

I shuddered at the thought. _A single blow crippled an island princess?_

Hoppo clenched her jaws, and spat onto a wave. "They refused him. He went from one to the other, starting with the patrol boats, then the destroyers and cruisers. Every one, struck by a single blow, then a spell to end their existence. Every one knowing their fate if they did not do as he asked."

She spun away from me, her hands moving towards her face as she turned. The raw sorrow in her voice was quickly replaced by rage. "He said my disobedience killed them. I had corrupted them. They no longer had sufficient purpose and singularity of thought." Her voice has once again reached shouting levels. "But I learned from him! Lying on the ground, I watched the spell. I saw the pattern in its creation change from ship to ship as he killed my fleet. He wanted me to see their deaths, but apparently did not consider that I might learn the spell."

Hoppo's head fell, her chin resting against her chest. "My faithful fleet. They washed my hair and made ice cream with a churn. They were my family. Loyal. They fought for me, and in the end, they died for me. He killed them because they were not hateful enough. They were not blindly obedient because I had not forced them to be."

Her head snapped up, spearing me with her glowing orange eyes. "When the last of my fleet was dead, he had one of his battleships approach me, to weaken me. I pretended to be crying, to be weak. He should have done the job himself." Hoppo snarled. "I gutted his battleship and used the spell I had seen him use to rip its life energy away. It was enough to heal me so that I could move."

"Then you fled."

"No." Hoppo stared at me, and spoke slowly, her voice quivering with rage. "Then I killed the controller's entire fleet, as he had killed mine. Every single ship that had come with him died. Then I attacked the controller himself."

Hoppo's shoulders drooped. "Again, he smashed me to the ground with a single blow and said that I might have learned something. I was to be allowed to live. Another attendant fleet would arrive to replace the one he had consumed. He burned my collection of reppus and my quarters and commanded me to live in a bare cave until I had killed ten shipgirls."

I shifted slightly on the water, hands kept in view, careful not to create a threatening movement. "But you didn't do that?"

She stared at me for several seconds, before shaking her head. "I did not."

I was unable to repress a sigh of relief.

Hoppo stared at me with no expression for several more seconds, like she was waiting for me to interrupt her again. It seemed like a bad idea to speak, or even move, so I remained absolutely still and attentive.

After a minute, she began talking again. Her voice was so low that I could barely understand her. "Then he saw the locket." Her hand raised up to touch a chain around her neck. "When I was newly captured, first installed on the island, I had begged one of the patrol boats to retrieve a keepsake of mine, and they brought me this." She touched the small chain around her neck again. "I don't know if it is really my parents or just some random humans, but for many years, I thought it was. My sanity hinged on it. Hinges on it, I think. Even now." She touched the locket again, caressing it.

"He tried to take it from me. Hysteria gave me strength and I struck out in madness and desperation, and managed to knock him down, then smashed him again and again until I could kill him with the same spell I had used on his ships."

She licked her lips. "Killing the one who had originally tortured me to bind me into Abyssal service broke the binding spell that held me in the child's state of mind that I had been trapped in. The energy of his death was different, far more potent than the ships had been. There was knowledge. Things I had never guessed at. I knew how to free myself from the magical bonds tying me to the island. I knew where every controller and Abyssal fleet was located. If I concentrated, I could tell where individual Abyssals were, even submarines."

Hoppo looked up at my gasp. "Yes, I am now a controller. Not only can I detect Abyssals, I know how to create and destroy them. I can do unto others what was done unto me."

"Is that why you came here, to create more Abyssals? To corrupt another world?"

"No." Hoppo hissed as her hand moved to her locket again. "I was going to try to join your forces and destroy every Abyssal on our world, but I made a near-fatal mistake. I could see the other controllers, but didn't think that they might be able to see me. Two controllers and their fleets intercepted me as I approached Midway. They nearly managed to kill me, but I destroyed their fleets, and the controllers moved away, waiting for reinforcements before re-engaging."

"You hid in the storm."

"I did. Using the knowledge of the dead controller, I was able to harness the power of the squall to create a rift to another world. You were caught in the spell because you were also in the storm, and apparently fairly close to me."

Carefully, I spoke. "You say you were going to join the shipgirls on our world to defeat the Abyssals there. Is there any reason for us to be enemies here? You say you do not plan on creating more Abyssals here. I see no reason for us to be in conflict. We've never fought you unless you attacked us first, Hoppo. You were always different, and we're all trapped here."

Hoppo looked at me with her glowing orange eyes. "No, we can go back. Whenever I want. If I want."

I gasped, and leaned forward. "We can go back? And you can help us find and destroy the Abyssals permanently?"

Hoppo sneered at me. "So eager to go back to that hell. No. I cannot return when I am this weak, or the other controllers will hunt me down and kill me. They will be watching near Midway. I will have to return to the same place I left from, and they know it."

I stared at her while I arranged my thoughts. "It was hell to you, Hoppo, but Kongo and I have friends there. We also have allies here, though you have mistreated one. You powered a spell with a storm. Can you heal yourself with storm energy?"

"I don't know for certain. The spell I know for traveling between worlds requires storm energy. I have no other spells that my stolen knowledge indicates can use storm energy, but I can experiment. When I am healed and charged with energy, if you want to return to our world with me, you are welcome to do so. As weak as the ambient magic of this world is, it might take years for me to fully heal and charge."

"What about food?"

"I've never used food to heal myself, I have always survived off ambient magic. I would be willing to try food for something more than entertainment."

"Great! There's this guy named Golem, and his power lets him do amazing things if you don't mind eating food shaped like giant hands. We were at a fundraiser and Imp bet Golem that Kongo could eat four hundred pounds of salami, so he got a slice of salami from his sandwich, put his hand on it, and made a giant hand-shaped salami come out of the table. It was cool! And delicious. He made one for me too, and a big block of cheese. Golem was in charge of feeding us for quite a while."

Hoppo stared at me. "He does what?"

"You just woke up. Some people on this world have amazing powers. There's a guy named Legend that can turn into light and shoot lasers. Defiant is half man, half machine. Tattletale can read your mind, or the next best thing to it. Wrench can make incredible vehicles. The ship we were traveling in is twice the size of Midway. Not just the island, the whole atoll."

Hoppo crossed her arms and stared down at me. "This all sounds like fairy tales. How are they doing these things with the tiny bit of magic I can feel?"

"I don't know, but if you follow me, you can see the ship."

"Why are you suddenly so trusting? You were afraid of me the whole time we were talking."

I turned to face her, and met her eyes. "I do not trust you. I'm letting you prove you can be trusted."

"If I can't be trusted?" Hoppo stared at me.

"Then I've made an unfortunate decision that I probably won't survive, because I strongly suspect that after hearing your story, Dragon has enough firepower watching you to take you down. She's been listening through her remote."

Hoppo's mouth twitched, and she looked around. I felt powerful radar pings. She sniffed the air, looked at Dragon's remote, and then turned back to me.

 _She doesn't believe me._

A wave of her hand and dragon's remote and the camera drone wobbled in the air before stabilizing. "Acceptable. I have freed the machine woman and the flying camera. Show me to this ship, and introduce me to this Golem person who makes giant quantities of food in hand shapes."


	9. Chapter 9

"Dragon?"

"Yes, Tattletale."

"We have a little problem."

"Tattletale, if you are calling me about something you can defer, please do. I'm sitting on a powder keg in the North Pacific right now. An S-class not-cape that's supposedly a magical girl from the same world as Fubuki and Kongo. She's a brute and blaster of very high but unmeasured capabilities, can apparently control my constructs, and probably other man-made machines as well. A machine master. She also seems to have some limited teleportation and other as-yet-undefined 'magical' abilities."

"Oh, fuck," Tattletale whispered.

I waited. Tattletale was normally more professional. She was likely using her power.

"Dragon, Simurgh started moving a couple minutes ago. On a direct course for-"

"Let me guess. The North Pacific?"

"Yes."

 _Trust, then verify._

I confirmed the Simurgh's position, heading, and speed. The Endbringer was moving at a leisurely pace. If she maintained the pace, she would arrive tomorrow.

 _There are times when I wish I could lose my mind and run around gibbering like most humans would in situations like this._

"Did you get any sense of purpose or intent from Simurgh when she moved, Tattletale?"

"Only curiosity."

"That almost makes it worse. Simurgh might not really understand what she's getting into."

Tattletale was silent for about three seconds. "Dragon, she might know exactly what she's getting into. How often has she ever seemed to act without clarity? She hasn't tried to clone Eidolon for at least a couple months as far as I've been able to tell."

 _Thanks, Tattletale. I needed that idea like I need a lightning strike on one of my datacenters._

"Is that your power talking, or a guess?"

"A guess. I'll need video and background data to give you more."

"You'll have it, Tattletale. Transmitting everything I have now to the high capacity dropbox."


	10. Chapter 10

**POV Kongo**

"No."

"Wrench, be reasonable. Riley was able to-"

" **Fuck you.** " Wrench didn't bother wiping the spittle off her chin as she stared up at the face of the new remote Dragon had sent to Big Lug to replace the one accompanying Hoppo and Fubuki. "I tol' you 'fore. Dat psychobitch step foot on Big Lug either she die, or I do."

"Tattletale-"

"Fuck Tattletale too. I watch Bonesaw kill dem." Wrench poked her head forward almost like a chicken and stuck her finger under Dragon's nose. "I watch 'er play with Merchant guts like a kid at Christmas."

Dragon started trying to talk again. "Hoppo is seriously injured. Tattletale says-"

Wrench almost exploded. "Dragon I don' give rat's ass. If da Devil cast da bitch out o' Hell an' God himself asked me to forgive 'er if we met in heaven, I'd still put a shank in da bitch's eye."

Wrench whipped around and walked through the door to her personal quarters, slamming it with a resounding clang. A moment later the intercom next to the door came to life. "Need ta build weapon platforms. Don bother 'less critical." There was more than a little vitriol in the voice.

I stared at the door for two or three seconds before turning towards Dragon. I sent a radio message on the encrypted Wrench-free channel. _"Dragon, you have to realize this isn't going to work. Not only that, Hoppo doesn't need Riley. She might look badly injured by human standards, but she's nowhere close to being incapacitated."_

 _"Kongo, Wrench needs to lose some of her hate. Riley was mind-raped by Jack Slash. She's no more responsible for what she did than Wrench is responsible for what Bonesaw and the S9 did to the Merchants."_

 _"Are you really trying to fight that fight now?"_ I send back, incredulously _. "This is not the time-"_

 _"Kongo, I'm not trying to win. I'm allowing myself to lose. This time. Wrench might talk like she's uneducated, but there's a good mind in there, even without the tinker power."_

I sent a sharp squeal over the radio connection between us. Dragon didn't flinch, but she turned her head in my direction a little more directly as I started sending more code. _"I really do not think this is a good time for you to be trying to help Wrench with her mental issues. Hoppo is going to be here in a couple hours. Wrench needs to be making weapons. We need to be planning for when Hoppo starts trying to kill us."_

A calm, patient reply came a second later. Too calm. Too patient. Fubuki had warned me about Dragon using feigned emotions in her communications with us. _"Kongo, I am simultaneously speaking with thirty-two different people other than you while trying to come up with a way to deal with the Hoppo situation. And the Simurgh situation. I'm also trying to rehabilitate Wrench. I believe her to be worth spending a few seconds priming her mentally for future conversations. I know what I am doing. Wrench will not allow Riley near her for at least another few years, but if I don't lay the proper groundwork over time, it will never happen, and Wrench will use that Tanto no more than a month after she finishes rebuilding the land masses destroyed by Leviathan and Scion."_

 _"How do you know that? She seems-"_

 _"Unthreatened. Sheltered here with people she feels she can trust not to hurt her, mostly. She has purpose. This is a good time for her, and look at her mental state. We can't shelter her forever. As she starts to stretch her power again, she's going to run short of worthwhile projects that she cares enough about to want to do them."_

I closed my eyes and tried to sort through what Dragon had just said. After a few seconds I opened my eyes and transmitted a response. _"Fine. Are you done laying the foundation for Wrench's future? Can we start working to make sure humans on this world have a future?"_

Imp spoke from the intercom next to the door. "Wrench isn't dumb, and she's watching you right now. Staring at each other in front of her door after that conversation and obviously speaking by radio means either you two are collaborating or getting ready to fight. Wrench is smart enough to distrust you two in either situation."

"Imp, she's likely recording what you say as well, since electronics can record and replay your activities." Dragon replied out loud, with an exasperated tone.

"Yup. But I'm talking out loud. The sneaky backstabber type being all open and honest, while the two warrior types plot and plan behind her back. She's not stupid. She mumbles to herself when she's working and talks to herself when she's asleep." Imp replied, confidently.

"Do you think I do not know this, Imp?" Dragon sighed.

 _"Is this conversation part of the plan too, Dragon?"_ I commented sharply by radio.

 _"I am in regular contact with both Dinah and Contessa, so, yes."_

I stared at Dragon's remote some more.

About three seconds later, Dragon sent more radio signal _"Kongo, no offense, but there is nobody on this planet that thinks on my level when it comes to multitasking and organization. Trust me. I know you are irritated that I agreed with Fubuki when she decided to go alone to meet Hoppo, but-"_

 _"Stop. Conversation over."_

 _"Do you really think I didn't have someone watching over the situation, Kongo?"_

 _"Dragon, I know I wasn't told that you did. Neither was Fubuki."_

 _"I had everything under-"_

 _I broke into her statement with a loud radio squeal. "_ _ **Stop. You are NOT my admiral, Dragon.**_ _We'll get along a lot better if you stop reminding me that you were probably using your own abilities and the powers of several thinker capes to help you guide mine and Fubuki's responses to better fit your agenda. As long as Fubuki returns safe, I will be able to forgive you for what Fubuki calls social-fu."_

I looked down and met calm robotic eyes looking up at me. I'd stepped towards Dragon, and was standing almost chest-to-chin with her.

 _Unacceptable. Shameful._ I thought to myself.

Then a little voice spoke in my head. _Social-fu?_

I carefully unclenched my fists and forced myself to take a step backward and bow slightly. _"Apologies, Dragon."_

We both knew I didn't mean it. Not until Fubuki returned safely, and maybe not even then.


	11. Chapter 11

**POV Dragon**

"I need something concrete."

Tattletale responded in a pained voice. "I'm done, and so is Dinah."

Dinah rubbed her temples with her thumbs. "I could answer maybe one-"

Tattletale interrupted and placed a hand on Dinah's shoulder. "No. Not without knocking yourself out. Dragon, if you ask Dinah another question, I will charge you with child abuse."

I immediately replied, with some sharpness. "That would interfere with my ability to protect Riley, Tattletale."

"Yes. It would, wouldn't it?" Tattletale smiled. "That's why I made the threat, and I will act on it. We're flesh and blood, Dragon. There's no immediate threat that we've been able to determine. Dinah and I stop using our powers. Now."

I stared at Tattletale, and she stared at me. "Understood, Tattletale, Dinah. I'd prefer to have you available to work when Simurgh and Hoppo reach a range where they might chose to engage each other."

Contessa spoke from her video feed. "Kongo and Fubuki feel like Scion did. I can get some readings if I ask indirect questions. They seem sincere, but they are also confused by Hoppo – almost as much as we are. They will definitely attack her if she becomes aggressive."

Tattletale nodded carefully. "I agree with that assessment. I can read the shipgirls fairly easily if I try to read them without their rigs. But, if I look at their rigs my power starts to go out of control and I have to shut it down."

With a sharp nod, Contessa spoke again. "I can't get anything at all from Hoppo. She's a black hole. Worse than Scion." Then she shook her head. "Simurgh is painful to try to read. I think she can detect it when I try, and intentionally makes random plans to hide her intent from me. I can't see her core intent. That much I do know."

Tattletale took a couple pills, and offered one of the same pills to Dinah, who quickly swallowed it and chased it with a glass of water. "Dragon, remember, you cannot let Kongo know you have no idea what to do. She barely considers you to be in charge. She will take the initiative and attack Hoppo from ambush if you don't keep her believing you have a plan."

Contessa nodded. "And based on their own testimony, which they believe, Hoppo will then kill her and Fubuki both, almost instantly."

I stared at Contessa. "Did you know trying to analyze Hoppo would be a fruitless discussion, Contessa?"

"No. I didn't. I'd never even tried to read the shipgirls before, so I had no expectations. They haven't had any impact on my current projects, which have mostly been in some remote dimensions." She raised a finger to her hat and tapped it. "Besides, it wasn't fruitless. Defiant was able to tell that Hoppo's rig was similar to the shipgirls' rigs. Riley was able to say that the biomechanical interfaces that she could detect and understand from a distance were similar in many ways to that of the shipgirls, except orders of magnitude more powerful. "

"So Hoppo is basically everything Kongo thinks she is, and just as dangerous?" I mused, fishing for responses.

"Dragon, I told you-"

Tattletale stopped talking and started to reach towards the screen to turn it off.

Dinah put her hand on Tattletale's right arm. "I'm not, Tattletale. You said no."

"OK, so nobody got any bad returns from bringing Golem to Big Lug." I asked.

Tattletale sent me another dirty look.

Dinah squeezed her arm again, whispering "I'm not the child I used to be. I won't use my power again unless it's needed, like we agreed."

Valkyie responded. "Hoppo is not appreciably faster than a sprinting normal human as far as she's shown, and that matches what the shipgirls have told us. I doubt very seriously that she can fly. Gravitor's ghost indicates she's as dense as the outer skin of an Endbringer."

The room went quiet as that sunk in.

"If need be, you can defeat her?" I asked.

"I don't know, but I strongly doubt she can defeat me." Valkyrie's expression was all confidence.

"Can you see anything like a shard in the shipgirls or Hoppo?" I asked.

"No. It's a shame too. If she's anything like what the Shipgirls say she is, Hoppo would make an incredible addition. The shipgirls would make welcome additions as well, I have few ocean-going Einherjar."

"We aren't headhunting here, Valkyrie." Legend spoke quietly. "If Hoppo becomes aggressive, I think I'm the first line of attack. She seems to be able to detect radio waves, but could not control Dragon's electronics, just the mechanical parts. I doubt she will be able to touch me in my light form, even if she's some sort of magical girl or whatever. I'll avoid the radio part of the electromagnetic spectrum if I engage her. If she's only as tough as the outer shell of an Endbringer, I can take her down, but it will take time and an immense amount of energy. Wrench and Imp will have to be evacuated from Big Lug. Golem too, if he's still there."

Valkyrie settled back in her seat with a nod and a small smile. I didn't need a thinker to tell me she would be more than happy to let Legend take the lead. If Legend fell, Valkyrie would gather his shard's connection as one of her Einherjar, and Legend was one of the most powerful capes alive. I quickly engaged a code module and designed a subroutine to monitor Valkyrie's actions closely.

"You're all dancing around Simurgh's apparent curiosity." Defiant spoke into the brief silence.

I replied immediately, and made a note to talk to Defiant later about his abruptness in meetings. Again. "Not dancing around it, but segregating the conversation. Kongo is hoping that Simurgh will see Hoppo as a threat. The shipgirls strongly respect the power of the Endbringers. That said, I do not want to expose any of them to Simurgh song, including Hoppo."

Valkyrie's brows drew together. "I don't know if I can teleport them. The shipgirls are absurdly massive. Kongo is far more massive than the sum total of everyone I've ever teleported." After a second, she continued. "I will not even try to teleport Hoppo. That power was abused by Kephri to the point of collapse, and the Einherjar is unable to act anywhere near as powerfully as the original cape."

"I want you to try if Simurgh sings for more than a minute or so in their presence."

"Not Hoppo, but the others, yes, I will try. Fubuki after the humans, then Kongo." Valkyrie said, with an expression that clearly indicated she wasn't changing her mind.

"Fubuki and Kongo won't go." Legend commented.

Tattletale raised an eyebrow onscreen. "Are you a second-trigger thinker now, too? I didn't see a light bulb over your head."

Legend smiled briefly, then leaned forward. "No. I've talked to them and thanked them for helping clean up Brockton Bay. We shared some stories. They didn't seem to be the types to back away from a fight. You saw what Fubuki did. She believed Hoppo could wipe her out with almost no effort, but she went anyway."

"I agree with Legend." Chevalier spoke for the first time in several minutes. "I've met those two as well. They definitely seemed like seasoned professional military types. Kongo asked me if I was an Admiral, and looked a bit disappointed when I said no. The look on Fubuki's face was funny." He smiled briefly.

Chevalier's smile quickly vanished as he pushed back his chair and rubbed his temples. "I think we're done here. We've exhausted our thinkers for little gain, and Dragon's better at non-thinker thinking than the rest of us combined. Thank you for consenting to join us, Contessa."

Contessa nodded at the screen as she reached towards it. "You're welcome. Good bye." Her grid block on the monitor went black.

Standing, Chevalier reached towards the monitor, pausing to speak with hand outstretched. "Dragon, keep me updated. I'll keep doing the political footwork to gather a strike force of capes that can fly or fight from on or in water." He nodded to Legend. "As a second line of defense if Hoppo becomes aggressive and has surprise abilities that neither you nor Valkyrie can handle. Or to deal with Simurgh if she goes actively aggressive."

He paused and sighed deeply. "Or if the two of them decide they like each other and want to pick up where the Endbringers left off after Scion went nuts."


	12. Chapter 12

**POV Fubuki **

Hoppo was slowly bleeding into the water from the half healed wounds she had re-opened by starting to move around. I kept a little distance between us and watching her at all times from the corner of my eye. Enough to let me maneuver if she attacked, but close enough that we could talk.

The problem with the talking part was that I had no idea what to say to this Hoppo. She wasn't just a twisted caricature of a young teenage girl any longer. There was a real personality in there. I couldn't just offer her a toy plane or ice cream.

She said she was once human and had been tortured by Abyssal controllers for years. Her memories of being human were flimsy enough that she wasn't even sure if the locket she wore had her parent's pictures in it or not. Her attendant fleet had been slaughtered in front of her eyes, remaining loyal to her until their deaths, and then she'd raged and killed an entire Abyssal fleet and an abyssal controller.

She even claimed to have killed those Abyssals permanently, and become a controller herself after absorbing the essence of the controller that was going to kill her for disobedience. If we could learn how to kill Abyssals permanently, it could, conceivably, allow us to win the war.

 _If we can ever get home._

 _If Hoppo isn't playing some sort of game._

Getting home might be a safe ice breaker.

"You said you can go home, by using a storm?"

Hoppo turned her head slightly towards me, red eyes moving in my direction. "Yes. Getting home is the easy part. Find a potent storm. Cast a portal spell utilizing storm energy. Exit portals are random due to storm chaos, but I can tell where I've been. Return portals are precise."

"The easy part." I sighed. "Kongo and I have been trapped here for months."

"You don't know what I know."

I nodded. That was certainly true.

"In fact, all shipgirls and your admirals are merely side-effects of Abyssal expansion."

I stopped in the water and spun to face Hoppo. "Say again?"

Hoppo did not stop, forcing me to start moving again to stay in conversational range. I saw a little quirk of a smile on her face as I pulled back up to parallel escort position a dozen meters off her port side.

After a few seconds, Hoppo started speaking again, solemnly. "Abyssals feed off of human despair, misery, and pain. But because we are magical beings, there is an underlying need for balance. Shipgirls will arise spontaneously to oppose us in any world we-"

Hoppo interrupted herself with a growl. "They. Shipgirls arise in any dimension they expand into."

"Are you seriously saying that Abyssals created shipgirls?"

"No. Our-"

Hoppo knuckled her forehead. "Their. Their presence forces a shift in balance of magical power. Just like nature abhors a vacuum, magic abhors imbalance. I have memories of worlds where Abyssals were land-based and opposed by tankgirls. On some heavily magical worlds, we fight as more abstract beings, and are opposed by Djinn or dragons. My controller was thousands of years old. His memories are… disturbing. But it's very clear that Shipgirls or their equivalent are merely an immune response to an infection of Abyssals."

"So, if you stay here-"

"Even the weak magic of this world will eventually respond to my presence. The aftereffects of magical balancing will likely cause this world's background magical potency to increase. There are several precedents."

Dragon spoke up from behind us. "That seems to be a statement that defies entropy."

Hoppo shrugged. "Entropy is natural, not magical. Magic has different 'rules'. Nature is about decay and growth. Magic is about balance."

Dragon went silent.

 _I'm a side-effect of-_

 _Wait a second._

"Balance. If you go back and destroy all the Abyssals on our world, won't they just reform because shipgirls are there?"

"No. You are a response to Abyssal infection. Shipgirls will cease to exist when Abyssals no longer inhabit our world."

"Oh." I responded, cleverly.

The thought of ceasing to exist because there was no longer a mission for us was alien, but I could accept it. I could die today, tomorrow, or next week. If I died because the Abyssals were gone, I wouldn't be leaving the mission unfinished.

I nodded to myself. "But what about you?"

"What about me? I don't understand the question."

"Won't you still be on our world, won't shipgirls still exist because you are there?"

"I won't be there. Just like I know how to get back to our world, my controller knows how to get back to every world he visited and most branchings from those worlds that he did not create. As I kill controllers, I will gain their knowledge of where we came from, one step at a time."

"You will try to roll them back."

Hoppo's right fist raised to her locket. "Yes. I will destroy them all. I will erase Abyssals."

Dragon spoke again. "Hoppo. You say that you will destroy them all, and collect their knowledge and memories. You are already using pronouns to describe yourself as a collective. As part of the Abyssals."

Hoppo stopped dead in the water and spun to Dragon's remote. "I am NOT one of them! I will NEVER be one of them again! I WILL destroy them all!"

"You have no memories of rebellious Abyssal controllers like you?" Dragon prodded.

"They were weak. Too mentally broken before they freed themselves. They had no focus." She whispered as her hand rubbed the locket again.

 _Time to change the subject. Food. Food is good._

"So, Dragon, were you able to get Golem to help us?"

* * *

"Yes. He's going to arrive at Big Lug shortly after you and Hoppo get there."

When Big Lug became visible to radar on the horizon, Hoppo stopped in the water. "There's not supposed to be an island here."

 _Her machine control isn't based on her radar line of sight then._

"That's Big Lug. Wrench' ship. Our base."

"That's a ship?" Hoppo increased the intensity of her radar. "Impossible."

"That was my reaction too, when Wrench floated her off the ocean floor. This world might have little magic, but they have abilities that seem like magic, because they were invaded by…"

Hoppo was staring at Big Lug like a cat staring at a canary in a cage.

"It's a long story."

I was fairly sure Hoppo didn't even realize I was talking, so I stopped.

After a few seconds, she started moving forward again, her attention never straying from Big Lug.

It wasn't long after that, when Wrench came over the radio in the clear, sounding angry and irritated. _"Hoppo. You control machines. Don' try to control MY machines. If you do, I stop fixin' 'em. Then they fail in a few days. Hiroshima and Nagasaki were li'l fireworks compare to Big Lug's power core failin'."_

Hoppo smiled and sent back a one word radio response after three or four seconds. _"Understood."_

* * *

Dragon's remote, Hoppo, and I approached the access ramp and were met by Kongo standing in calf-deep water, her rig deployed. Though her primary weapons were never aimed at Hoppo, they were never far from being aimed at the island princess. Kongo's eyes never left Hoppo for more than a moment. I couldn't remember seeing the fast battleship look so unhappy before.

As Hoppo approached the ramp, she suddenly dropped into the water while still wearing her rig, sending up a titanic plume of water and generating a crater in the water that nearly capsized me.

While I struggled to keep my keel under me and avoid running into Big Lug, I saw Dragon's remote diving under the water as well, following Hoppo.

Kongo rode the sudden huge wave as it ran up the ramp, wildly gyrating as she worked to keep herself from slamming against the raised walls on either side of the ramp. She didn't succeed entirely, smacking her stern against one wall with a crash.

As we both recovered our balance, I looked down into the water. "What made her-"

Kongo was rubbing her left butt cheek and muttered "She had reason for Hara-Kiri, but it didn't seem like she was planning on performing the deed any time soon."

We both stared down into the water. I sent an open radio message to Dragon. _"Did Hoppo say anything to you before she killed herself?"_

There was a pause of a second before Dragon responded. _"What?"_

Kongo and I stared at each other, trying to figure out how Dragon, as intelligent as she was, couldn't parse that sentence.

 _"Did you just say you thought Hoppo killed herself?"_ Dragon sent. _"She's just swimming around under Big Lug. It looks like we'll be back over there in a couple minutes."_

 _"She's swimming underwater, with her rig?"_ Kongo asked, incredulously.

 _"Yes."_ Came the absurd response.

I bobbed on the waves near the ramp, and Kongo stood calf-deep again. We stared at each other for another few seconds.

Kongo frowned and spoke out loud. "Island princesses always seem more distressed when we manage to sink them in deep water. I thought…"

"Hoppo has always been different. Now she's more different. I'm beginning to think she's so different that we need to re-evaluate everything about her."

Kongo shook her head. "Not everything. She's still capable of killing huge numbers of people. Dragon transmitted your conversation back to us in the clear. It sounds like a convenient story. If Hoppo knows that the cape humans on this world can render her helpless, and they might well be able to, she would play for time until she could heal fully and establish herself somewhere with a low cape population density."

"Have you spoken to Dragon about that?" I asked. It did make sense.

"Yes. She seemed to take the idea seriously, but she's not giving any details about why we're inviting Hoppo here to feed her and help her heal." Kongo shook her head. "It's so frustrating to have no acting admiral for decisions above the tactical level. I want to trust Dragon, she's brilliant, but there's no proper chain of command."

I felt a moment of pity for Kongo. As a destroyer, I frequently operated completely in the dark, unaware of the full strategic consequences of my orders. Capital ships needed more information. They were nearly always better informed, and in closer contact with higher command. Kongo felt the lack of upper echelon contact far more than I did. It wouldn't be polite to point that out to her as long as it wasn't hurting her performance, it was a well-known psychological issue with capital ships.

"What do your officer fairies think?"

"I consulted with my admiral and captain fairies, and they just stare at me in confusion. It's too different from World War II or Abyssal scenarios for them, I think. Humans with strange powers and Hoppo acting like she's defecting." Kongo shrugged, plaintively. "And my crew fairies are worse. Ever since the first crew fairy saw me walking around on the deck of another ship like a normal person they are all staying below decks. I think they're trying to ignore the outside world right now."

I nodded. "Most of mine have buttoned themselves up and stayed below decks as well. I've only had to round up a couple. Wrench brought me one of my engineering crew that had found Big Lug's power plant. She found him staring at the power output monitors. It didn't appear as if he tried to take anything apart, but he was in shock for days. Dragon brought me another that had attached itself to her remote and tried to start opening maintenance access points. I had words with that one and explained that Dragon's remote is to be treated like a person, not a thing."

Kongo and I both chuckled. Normally officer fairies were well-behaved, but crew fairies could be rambunctious hellions. Nothing like pilot fairies, on average, but every crew had at least a couple extroverts or troublemakers. Trying to keep track of them all the time was just about as impossible as keeping track of all the real crewmen on real human warships. Kongo probably had some more adventuresome crew fairies wandering around when she slept, but they hadn't gotten into trouble yet.

Kongo and I smiled at each other, amused by the reactions of our fairies to this world. At the same time, we were both fully aware that ship fairies were a part of us. Kongo had just obliquely told me that she was confused, unsure of her role, but ready for action. I'd told her that I was too, but at the same time I was really curious about this world. In other words, we were probably just fine, mentally, considering our ship types and what was going on around us.

The brief moment of us comforting each other was suddenly interrupted by a splash in the water behind me as Hoppo resurfaced.

 _She really can swim underwater. How? She's an island princess. Island facilities are no more waterproof than surface ships._

Kongo did her best to avoid being subtle. Like usual. "How did you just submerge? I've never seen an Island Princess submerge, even when it would have saved them from being killed."

Hoppo went motionless on the water for a second. "Hello, Kongo. Have you not been listening to the data Dragon has been sending back to this ship?"

"I have, but it doesn't explain-"

Hoppo interrupted with a raised finger, and Kongo allowed her to speak. "Yes. It does. I am no longer just an Island Princess. I am a controller. Abyssal central command and control areas are in the deepest oceans, so all controllers must be able to submerge."

Kongo spoke softly, intently. "Controllers are male."

"No. Controllers are normally defeated admirals, tortured into submission, who are normally male, but they don't have to be."

"Impossible. No admiral would-"

"I have memories that say otherwise, Kongo. Many memories."

Kongo stared for several seconds before averting her eyes slightly, and said nothing else.

"Will the ship support me?" Hoppo asked.

Wrench's voice emerged from Dragon's remote. "How much do you mass?"

"I don't know for sure, but definitely less than this vessel, based on it's displacement."

There was an annoyed grunt. "Please come aboard slowly. If she lists more than twenty meters before you are clear of the water, I'll have to dump some cargo."

Hoppo nodded.

 _Wrench must be having kittens right now._

 _I'm not far behind her._

Kongo left the ramp and joined me in the water.

Hoppo ignored the fact that both of us were moving behind her. "Your mass wouldn't make any appreciable difference, Kongo, you could have stayed there."

 _That's a sentence I would have never believed I'd hear before I came to this world._

"Perhaps." Kongo paused after the first word. "They have a saying on this world about the straw that broke the camel's back. I'd rather not be the straw."

Suddenly Hoppo went motionless, raising her hand to her locket. "We had that saying on our world too, Kongo. I remember hearing it when…" She shook her head and went silent, then slowly approached the ramp. "Beginning to board now, Dragon."

"I'm not Dragon." Wrench said from Dragon's remote.

Hoppo stopped and looked to her side, towards the remote that was hovering there after emerging from the water. "The voice was different. I thought it had been altered somehow. The creator of the artificial woman didn't build this ship?"

"No." This time it was Dragon's voice. "The ship is Wrench's creation. I specialize in different areas."

Hoppo nodded. "Beginning to board now, Wrench."

Wrench's voice returned. "If you hear a sharp whistle, please return to the water."

"I will."

With a slow, careful motion of one leg, Hoppo stepped down from the water's surface and put her foot on the access ramp. Then she slowly started moving forward with her rig as she slid her foot on the ramp.

Big Lug groaned loudly enough that I could feel it through the surface of the water and with my ears at the same time. I could see the ship starting to settle and shift in the water slightly as Hoppo skated her weight up the ramp. Hoppo did not move up in the water as she moved forward.

Wrench's voice came from Dragon's remote. "Eight meters sideways displacement. Your weight almost all on ship?"

"No. About half."

"Continue." Wrench's voice was taut, stressed.

Hoppo continued moving forward on the ramp until the ship stopped dipping under her weight, then stepped onto Big Lug with her other foot. I gulped as the absurdly massive ship bobbed and dipped in the water like a rowboat.

"Stop." Wrench's voice squeaked out. "Gimme a minute t' rebalance power to th' stasis fields."

"My weight is entirely on the vessel now, Wrench."

"Don't move. You generatin' extreme stress in several critical areas. It'll be only 'bout fifteen seconds." I could hear the sound of a keyboard as Wrench spoke.

Hoppo stood still.

Kongo looked at me, then at Hoppo. "I think we're going to give Golem a workout at lunch."

I didn't look away from Big Lug. It was listing at least fifteen meters under Hoppo's weight.

Wrench apparently was distracted enough that she didn't realize she was still broadcasting as she muttered to herself. "Water displacement mass point three six Petagrams. Girl got a serious weight issue."

Hoppo coughed and glared at Dragon's remote.

"Damn. Sorry. Din't mean ta broadcast." Wrench actually sounded apologetic. "Stasis fields along your path are good now."

Kongo looked to me and whispered. "What's a Petagram?"

"I don't know. I'm not sure I want to." I replied, staring at Big Lug listing in the water under Hoppo's weight. The same Big Lug that Kongo could do jumping jacks on, without moving the ship at all.

Hoppo slowly followed the ramp up, not looking back. The rest of us followed her. If I didn't even know what the metric prefix for her weight meant, we probably weren't going to make a difference.

As we approached Dragon's remote, she whispered "A Petagram is a Trillion kilograms."

Kongo and I both stared at each other, wide eyed.

Wrench spoke again, this time from a speaker on the ship. "Hoppo, you can't go in crew quarters. Only hull 'n cargo section can support yo mass. I can make a place in th' middle of th' cargo area ina few minutes. Jus' tell me how much room you want."

"I noticed your ship's draft. You are carrying an impressive mass of cargo." Hoppo replied. "What trade goods are required in such quantities?"

After a moment, Wrench answered, clearly irritated by not getting an answer. "We rebuildin' an island. Cargo is earth and stone."

"Oh." Hoppo started moving a little quicker up the ramp.

As she cleared the top of the ramp and looked into the cargo area, Hoppo stopped, clearly stunned. "Incredible. I thought this ship was an island when I saw it on radar. Now I see that you have an island as _cargo_."

"What you want for living quarters, Hoppo?" Wrench asked again, sounding a little irritated.

Hoppo shook her head. "I would prefer to make them myself, if I can build on top of your pile of earth and stone here?

"Hrm. Fine. Long as you don' build nothin' that can't be destroyed when we get t' Japan an' have t' unload cargo."

* * *

As far as I know, before that day, no shipgirl had ever seen an Island Princess build a base.

We all watched in amazement for nearly an hour as Hoppo deployed literally hundreds of construction imps with bulldozers and other miniature pieces of heavy equipment, all doing work that should have been flatly impossible for machines only a foot long. After a few minutes, she engaged her rig again, and the largest mouth began eating materials gathered by her imps. Then she deployed even more imps, and provided them with concrete and metals from her rig.

A little more than an hour later, Hoppo had flattened a one hundred by one hundred meter section of dirt and stone in the middle of the pile in Big Lug's central cargo bay. On that flat area, she had created several structures entirely made of concrete. It looked almost Greek or Roman in style.

Neither Wrench nor Imp came into my line of sight at any time as Hoppo built her living quarters.

As she inspected the area and collected her imps, Hoppo turned to me. "I believe you mentioned something about food?"

 _I hope Golem is up for this._

"Dragon, when is Golem arriving?"

"He's standing by." Dragon's voice came out of the remote that had been watching Hoppo build.

Hoppo dismissed her rig again, and moved to sit on one of the concrete benches around a long table.

I did not miss the fact that she chose to sit at the head of the table. And there was no bench at the opposite side of the table. There were eight short benches, all at least half a table length away from Hoppo.

"Am I going to have the opportunity to meet you, Dragon, or Wrench? I suppose I understand if you are afraid to be near me, but I have less incentive to attack you than I have to attack these two." She waved towards Kongo and me. "Fubuki and Kongo have actually fought me before, and been part of task groups that defeated me."

"I am incapable of being there in the flesh, Hoppo. Wrench will be joining us though."

 _She will?_

I turned to look at Dragon's remote. There was no way I was going to start an argument in front of Hoppo, but exposing Wrench, of all people, to Hoppo in a situation where we couldn't simply turn off Wrench's ability to transmit might be very bad.

"So, lunch will be attended by the two shipgirls, Wrench, and the mechanical woman as a voice piece for Dragon, as well as the Golem person. But Golem isn't here yet, right?"

"Correct." Dragon answered as she waved for us to follow her to join Hoppo.

"So, who is the second human on the ship, if it's not you, and not Golem?"

Dragon stopped, and raised her hand for Kongo and me to stop. "That is Imp. Her power is to be undetectable to humans. Both Kongo and Fubuki can detect her. We were unsure if she would be detectable to you. She will also be joining us, since you can detect her." Dragon paused. "How did you detect her? She is nowhere near us yet."

Dragon waved us forward again as Hoppo started to speak.

"The same way I can tell that you have someone spying on me through a portal. I can detect humans by their emotions. Once every minute, I am detecting a human presence for several seconds at around a mile distance, then it disappears. The human is very curious and aggressive, but not fearful of me."

"That is Valkyrie. She will continue to oversee our conversation exactly as she has been. I will inform her that you can detect her portals even from a mile away."

Hoppo stared at Dragon's remote for several seconds as we continued to approach and then nodded. "Very well. Will anyone else be joining us?"

"No. Golem has just been teleported in, and will be arriving with Wrench and Imp."

As Dragon was speaking, Hoppo's head turned towards the living quarters, and she nodded. "The Valkyrie woman just delivered him."

* * *

Several minutes later, Golem, Wrench, and Imp arrived. Golem was walking to Wrench's left, and Imp was behind the two of them. When Golem first got a clear look at Hoppo, he stopped and stared.

"Are you all right?" He asked Hoppo before spinning to face Dragon's remote. "Dragon, you need Panacea for this, not me."

"I am not in any danger of dying from my wounds. They are mostly minor now."

"You look like you walked straight off the set of Hellraiser."

"I don't know what a Hellraiser is, but you seem very disturbed by my appearance. I've been advised that you are able to make food in large quantities. If you can do that, I can heal myself, and you won't need to be disturbed by my appearance."

"Sure, I can make as much food…

I tried to catch Golem's eye as I shook my head.

He looked at me with a puzzled expression as he finished his sentence. "…as you can eat. I'm still not quite sure why I'm needed here. Wrench has been feeding two shipgirls for months."

I face-palmed. Everyone looked at me. Then I blushed.

"That was good, Fubuki. You're getting better." Imp commented. "Can you see and hear me, Hoppo, or just detect my emotions?"

"I can see and hear you. You are Imp, then?"

Imp nodded.

Wrench walked up and sat next to me. "I'm Wrench."

Hoppo raised an eyebrow. "Good to meet you, Wrench. Even though it is not a warship, this is by far the most impressive ship I've ever seen, and I've seen a lot of ships between my memories and the memories of the controller."

Wrench grunted something that sounded like 'thank you'. She was on good behavior so far, for Wrench.

Imp sat next to Wrench on her other side. If Wrench started getting out of control, Imp would put her hand over Wrench's mouth. Imp did not like that job, but it had been necessary on a couple occasions. Normally our guests wouldn't remember Imp silencing Wrench, but Hoppo would, and that might make the situation… complex.

Dragon spoke next. "I'm bringing the food and food templates now with the other remote."

Hoppo looked at Dragon's remote. "You can control more than one artificial woman at a time?"

"Hundreds, if I need to."

"Simultaneously, doing different tasks?"

"Yes, and multiple different models of remotes. I multitask rather well."

Hoppo did not look impressed, which irritated me for a moment before I remembered how many imps she had been directing while building the villa we were eating in.

"Wait a second." I spoke. "You just poured this concrete. How is it cured already?"

"It would have been useless if it hadn't been cured."

I stared at her for a second. "That's why. Not how."

Hoppo shrugged. "Your carrier friends eat raw bauxite and make planes out of it, and you are surprised that I can cure concrete at an accelerated rate? It's just something I do."

I turned my head and stared at Kongo as she started laughing. At me. Which only made her laugh louder.

"Calm down, 'Buki, if you had seen the expression on your face, you would have laughed too."

Golem raised a finger and got my attention. "You have friends that eat bauxite?" He was smiling, and obviously enjoying my discomfort.

I didn't let it get to me, retaining my professional calm.

"Ahem." I cleared my throat. "Yes, carrier shipgirls eat bauxite to replace lost fairy planes."

"Wow. That's quite a diet. Do you need any non-human-foods made? Is that why I'm here?"

I shook my head. "No, you're here mostly to feed Hoppo."

"I still don't get it, but I don't mind. It's different."

Dragon's second remote arrived with a large box under each arm.

Hoppo stared at the boxes, then shifted her gaze to Kongo and me, and made a puzzled face, but said nothing.

Dragon dropped a thin sheet of pressed rice about six inches in diameter on the table in front of Golem, and then another, larger sheet almost two feet wide in a large bowl in the middle of the table.

Golem reached out with his hand, and pushed it into the sheet of pressed rice in front of him. As he did so, a gigantic hand-shaped piece of pressed rice pushed itself out of the larger sheet of rice in the bowl.

Suddenly, Kongo and Imp looked at one another, and burst into song.

Try, try, try to understand  
He's a magic man  
Oh yea  
(Ooh)  
He got magic hands

I face-palmed, then realized Hoppo was coming into Kongo and Imp's little joke at Golem's expense with no foresight at all. I tilted my head to look at Hoppo.

Hoppo was staring at the hand made of rice. As I watched, she reached out and gripped a rice-finger, and bent it, breaking it off before nibbling on it.

Golem, on the other hand, was staring alternately at Kongo and Imp, blushing furiously, and looking utterly adorable.

A couple minutes later, we got down to the serious business of eating.

Two hours later, everyone was done eating but Hoppo. She was still eating at a furious pace, a whole hand of rice by herself every couple minutes. The rest of us were talking amongst each other, occasionally glancing at Hoppo as she ate. Kongo had kept up with her for the first hour, but after six hundred or so pounds of rice, she was full.

Eventually, Golem asked "Not that I have anywhere I need to be any time soon, but how much more food do you need, Hoppo?"

Hoppo paused, chopsticks poised with a large chunk of rice at her mouth. "I hadn't really thought about it. I've never eaten solid food as a primary source of resupply. Normally I feed on magical energy and eat food for enjoyment every now and then." Her eyes opened wide. "Oh. Err. I knew I'd need a lot of food, but I just dug around in controller memories."

Golem cocked his head to the side. "And?"

"How big can you make your rice hands?"

"I've made extremely large hands before. Pressed rice is easy to work with."

"What is extremely large?"

"A hundred feet tall, but that was reinforced concrete."

"Can I get a couple of those?"

"What?"

"A couple extremely large hands of rice."

"You can't possibly eat that much."

Hoppo stared at Golem.

"Your mouth is no bigger than my mouth. There's only so much food that you can eat with a mouth."

Hoppo continued staring, but her mouth twitched. It might have been a smile.

"The rice will rot before you can eat more than a tiny fraction of it, Hoppo."

She relaxed a little, definitely smiling. "No, it won't."

"Show me how you will eat hundreds of cubic feet of rice before it rots." Golem pushed his hand into the sheet of rice in front of him, and another full hand of rice appeared in the bowl in the middle of the table. He looked at Hoppo and raised an eyebrow.

When Hoppo summoned her rig, everyone went still, ready to fight.

Golem's hand was poised over the concrete table, not the rice.

Dragon's remotes were obviously prepared to grab Wrench and Imp.

Kongo and I were ready to kick back from the table and give the others cover for the few seconds that we'd live without our rigs before Hoppo turned us into scrap.

I was hoping that Valkyrie was still watching, because there was no way we were beating Hoppo.

Hoppo broke the silence, looking over all of us from the head of the table. "I am not attacking. I am doing what Golem asked."

The largest mouth assembly on Hoppo's rig appeared slowly over her shoulder, then reached forward and down, enveloping the entire rice hand in a single bite before returning to position behind her.

Golem shook his head and stared at the blood that had dripped off the gigantic mouth when it crossed the table. "Hellraiser, I swear. Fine. A few thousand cubic feet of rice it is."


	13. Chapter 13

Hoppo leaned forward. "You brought me here, fed me, led me to believe you were concerned with my welfare, and now you tell me that one of the most powerful beings on your planet is apparently hunting me?" All three of her rig's heads and her human head jutted forward, inching closer to the mechanical woman in front of her as she spoke.

Standing at the edge of the clearing where the meal table was located in Hoppo's concrete villa, Kongo and I looked at each other, but said nothing. This was Dragon's conversation. We were only here to delay Hoppo if she went nuts, so Imp could knock Wrench out and get her to safety via a Valkyrie teleport. Golem had left before the conversation started. Legend was apparently somewhere overhead in light form, invisible to Hoppo, waiting to see what happened. Dragon's remote was disposable.

Dragon's voice dropped an octave, almost to a growl. She was definitely laying down some serious social-fu. "I do not remember _asking_ you to come to the ship." She waved her hands in mine and Kongo's direction. We decided to give you the benefit of the doubt after you body-snatched me and invited yourself to the ship."

Hoppo's human head jerked back slightly, eyes open wide.

Dragon leaned forward, into Hoppo's personal space, and stuck her remote's finger under Hoppo's nose just short of touching. "Rather than fighting you, and we could have fought you, young lady, we chose to give you the benefit of the doubt and believe the tale you were telling."

Turning her back to Hoppo, Dragon took two steps away before starting to pace back and forth in front of her. "You were either a masterful liar, or truly distressed. I felt you were the latter. I've dealt with far more than my fair share of victims and liars, and trust my judgment.

Despite my self-confidence, a large number of other highly qualified people whom I trust were consulted and none of them were able to conclusively indicate you were lying. I chose to allow you a moment of rest, some time to heal, and maybe even some time to enjoy yourself before I told you that the Simurgh was coming."

Hoppo was silent for a moment. "I'm sorry. I wasn't thinking right. I had just woken up and-"

"There is no need to apologize for what happened before." Dragon shook her head. "Now that we have an understanding about what actually happened to get us to this point, I hope we can move forward with more cooperation."

"Yes." Hoppo dismissed her rig, and closed her eyes while she took a deep breath. "So, what is this Simurgh, and why is it hunting me?"

"Simurgh looks like a human female about fifteen feet tall, with many wings randomly placed on its body. It can fly, but does not actually use its wings for flight. It is a being of immense power, with a core density approaching that of a black hole. Its outermost later is roughly as dense as you are. The layers between are progressively more dense. It is telekinetic, able to lift masses at least as large as a large brick building with its mind. It is able to use the tinker powers of any tinker within a half mile or so of its location. She does not need to breathe or eat."

Hoppo looked thoughtful.

Dragon paused. "All of this is meaningless compared to her most dangerous power. Simurgh can calculate the future to a high degree of accuracy, and can sing in such a way that she will reprogram your mind. It takes roughly fifteen minutes for her to perform a reprogramming on a person. We limit exposure to her song to only ten minutes."

Hoppo got a puzzled look on her face. "Reprogram minds?"

"You are familiar with Enigma Machines of World War 2?"

"I am."

"Imagine you are an Enigma Machine. Simurgh can replace rotors if you listen to her song long enough, and you cannot simply wear earplugs. If you stay near Simurgh when she is singing for more than ten minutes, we will quarantine you. If you refuse to be quarantined peacefully, we will quarantine you forcibly. If you escape quarantine, the cape community will work together to find and kill you. Simurgh apparently reads alternate futures, and programs you to take specific actions at certain times to create futures they desire. There are thousands of horror stories about what people programmed by Simurgh do, years later."

"Oh. Like magical compulsion." Hoppo growled, and her rig popped back into existence. "I am the master of my own mind now. Simurgh will be unable to touch the workings of my thoughts. I will destroy her if she tries."

Dragon went motionless, and briefly stared Hoppo in the eyes, clearly expressing disbelief strongly enough that it couldn't possibly be missed. "Hoppo, she's not using magic. We don't think. We have no way of knowing for sure, but no capes on this world have magic, it's all based on science. Fantastic science that seems like magic sometimes, but science all the same. Our thinkers do have a hard time reading you, so you might be immune. Some few capes are. But we can't know that, _because_ most of our thinkers can't get a clear reading on you. Dinah and Contessa tried to determine if you were immune to Simurgh song, but both failed to get anything useful from their powers. Simurgh will know if you are immune. She will only sing briefly in your presence if you are. If she sings to you for more than a few seconds, flee. We will try to help you escape."

Dragon raised her hands. "But all this may be unnecessary. Since many thinkers have a hard time reading you, Simurgh may as well. If that is the case, she may simply be coming to get a closer look. She has not been aggressive since Scion went berserk and Eidolon died."

"Why is she hunting me? I've never heard of her before, and I don't plan on staying in this world."

"The only reliable reading we have from her is that she is curious."

"Maybe she's curious about this ship? It's much easier to see on the water than I am."

There was another pause from Dragon. "We aren't entirely certain. That is one reason why we want you to leave the ship and see where she goes. If she is interested in the ship, which is very doubtful, it will be the first time she has approached an inanimate object in a non-combat situation."

Kongo spoke, slowly. "Dragon, you have access to weather data of the surrounding ocean, right?"

"There are no storms nearby, Kongo."

"Are there any capes that can make storms?" I asked.

Dragon's remote nodded to me. "Not on the scale that Hoppo says she needs to cast her spell. At least not without a great deal of lead time. Weather manipulation capes are rare, and generally very limited in scope."

"Oh." I replied.

"They were both good ideas." Dragon said. "If there was a storm nearby, sending Hoppo there to meet Simurgh would probably have been the best choice, so she could perhaps escape back to your world."

I dodged one of Wrench's little eight-legged workbots that was carrying what looked like a copper rod and a spool of wire. There were a few more of the machines visible, moving around the surface of the ship with more copper rods and wire. Yet another improvement on the Big Lug. I returned my attention to Hoppo and Dragon.

I missed some of the conversation watching the little machines and briefly trying to puzzle out what Wrench was doing.

"Hoppo, seriously, we have some idea of how powerful you are, from Kongo and Fubuki. A dozen shipgirls could defeat you before. A dozen capes as powerful as Kongo can't even slow Simurgh down. We've fought Endbringers with hundreds of capes. Only Scion ever managed to kill an Endbringer. The power he used to do it destroyed most of England with a single blast, and cracked the continental shelf of the United States. Both of those events were a single strike of his power. The same power that he used to kill Endbringers. Endbringers took several attacks to kill them with that power. Endbringers are unimaginably tough. You will die if you try to engage her. If she sings, just run."

Hoppo stared at Dragon, rig quivering, clenching her fists. "I am done with fleeing."

"Hoppo." I quietly, calmly interjected. "If you die here, who will defeat the Abyssals?"

Hoppo stared at me, bright orange eyes under flame red eyebrows, like a double sunset. She said nothing, simply staring for several seconds. Her rig suddenly disappeared again, and she slumped. "You have a point. This Simurgh is nothing to me. I will not risk my life and the potential to end the Abyssal threat in order to engage in a pointless battle with it."

I nodded. "Kongo and I will join you as escorts."

Dragon turned to me. "What? We do not know if you two are immune. We made plans-"

I interrupted Dragon with a raised finger. "Kongo and I discussed it a little while ago, and changed our plans. If Hoppo dies, we're stuck here. This is our logic." I paused, and Dragon remained silent. "We traveled here via magic, apparently. Your research is all science based. Your science to travel dimensions has not led you to our world, and even Scion never came to our world as far as we know. The powers he distributed are nonmagical. There were no human capes on our world. There was more than enough human misery for what you call trigger events." I paused. "I suspect that Scion didn't even know our dimension existed, because science cannot bridge the gap between our worlds. If that is the case, we need to help Hoppo survive, or we will be stuck here. We have no choice but to operate under the assumption that this is the case, because there is only one Hoppo."

Hoppo stared at the two of us. Kongo stared back. This was one of her least favorite plans, ever, but she was the one who helped me puzzle out the logic. She knew as well as I did that we had no choice.

Kongo spoke, adding something I hadn't considered. "Dragon, Hoppo says we will cease to exist if she dies permanently or leaves this dimension. She has been truthful and honest in all our dealings with her, up to this point." She stared at Dragon. "I will not go to my end so quietly."

I looked at Kongo, stunned that I hadn't considered that angle, but nodded after only a moment's thought. She had a point. I'd looked at it tactically, not personally.

"If I can't fight Simurgh, you two certainly cannot." Hoppo spoke softly, looking at us with a strange expression. "Besides which, she can't kill me. That requires magic."

"Not a good assumption, Hoppo." I shook my head. "First, Simurgh and all the Endbringers were famous for somehow managing to be able to kill people that should not have been in danger. What if she simply eats your remains? She's massive enough to do it. We always had to leave Island Princess corpses where they fell." I paused. "Trying to beat her is not our plan. If Simurgh sings or attacks, Kongo and I attack her, draw her attention, and then all three of us flee at best speed. You will not attack her, only flee. Hopefully one of us will survive to return home with you."

"Simurgh will not be so easily drawn off if Hoppo is her target." Dragon protested.

"Then we do our best to cover Hoppo in a running defense, and we die fighting." Kongo interjected loudly, with a broad swing of her right arm. "There is no other option for us. You will have to forcibly restrain us or destroy us to prevent us from escorting Hoppo." As she finished speaking, Kongo crossed her arms and looked down her nose at Dragon.

Dragon looked at me with a questioning expression.

Kongo snorted and smiled slightly.

I took a half-step closer to Kongo, and nodded. "We must defend Hoppo with our lives, or our lives may become meaningless, or even be taken from us for no return. That is what we believe, and what we will act on, whether or not it is true."

* * *

 _The structure is ready. Events surrounding the Primary have stabilized to a point where indirect calculations lead to a desirable end result with near unity._

Various devices energized in a halo around Simurgh, and a hole opened in the air in front of her.

* * *

 _"Oh, Shit! High energy teleportation at distance two kilometers, heading 183, elevation two hundred meters."_ Wrench screamed over the general com channel. _"Strong radar return, small cross section."_

Dragon went still, then spoke into the com as well. _"This was unexpected, abnormal behavior."_

My radar was indicating a very strong return matching the data Wrench provided. It was motionless at first, but suddenly started to move too fast. Way too fast.

I sent my observations over the net. _"Dragon, whatever that is, it's moving at over two hundred kilometers per hour, and circling us. If that's Simurgh-"_

I was interrupted by Dragon. _"It is Simurgh. Valkyrie is teleporting-"_

Dragon went silent, briefly. _"Valkyrie can no longer teleport to or from this location. Something is blocking her, out to five hundred kilometers. Legend is the only cape that can reach us quickly, but Chevalier is refusing to allow Legend to assist us by himself. The entire support group will arrive as a unit in roughly five minutes."_

Kongo nodded sagely. _"I knew Chevalier felt like an admiral. Do not split up your forces and expose individual units against a superior opponent."_ My best friend in this world stared out at where Simurgh was circling us. _"She's dropping something, but whatever it is, it's disappearing right after she drops it."_

Staring out over the water at the Simurgh as she circled us, Hoppo grumbled. _"I can't run off the ship, or I might capsize it or destroy it and kill the rest of you if the power plant explodes."_

Wrench responded immediately. _"Yes. Hoppo move too fast, it overload stasis generators an' zero point generator may fail hard. Boom."_

Hoppo nodded. _"I cannot evade her. She's many times faster than me. Even Fubuki can't evade her for more than a minute or two. I will fight from here if she sings."_ Hoppo engaged her rig and moved to a pedestal on the center of her villa.

 _"Wrench, do you have an escape vehicle?"_ Dragon asked.

 _"No. I stay with th' ship. You knew this. I also very busy finishing a weapon."_

Dragon sighed. _"Imp, cancel bedtime. We need her awake."_

There was a pause. _"You bitch. You were gonna have Imp knock me out?"_

 _"Yes. We'll talk later. Let's survive now."_ Dragon snapped.

 _"OK, bitch. After we survive, you get th' fuck off Big Lug or I make you get off. Imp, you and I gonna have a serious talk after we cook this turkey."_

Dragon ignored Wrench and turned towards Simurgh, who was finishing her circle around us at two kilometers. The Endbinger stopped in the air at two kilometers distance.

Five seconds later, we heard it. Dragon had called it singing, but it really wasn't singing. It was more like birds chirping to the sound of fingernails on a chalkboard, with a little out of tune violin thrown in.

 _"Hoppo, if ya move more than a tiny bit while generators 'r chargin, we die."_

 _"What?"_ Hoppo called back to Wrench over the radio.

 _"Can't miss it. Don't move. Twenty seconds. Dragon, your remote is well-shielded?"_

 _"Yes."_

"Damn. Too bad."

Kongo and I looked at each other. I spoke on the comm. _"Wrench, can Kongo and I run to the water?"_

"Yes. Wait. No. Maybe." She breathed deeply, quickly, to the sound of keystrokes. _"Don't. No time to recalc integrity balance on copper lines before shot. After shot, run. Will redirect an extra quarter percent power to integrity until you in water to be safe."_

 _"Got it, Wrench!"_ I advised as Kongo and I turned towards the ramp, ready to run after whatever Wrench was about to do. I hoped it was as obvious as she said it was going to be.

That was when I noticed my hair starting to stand on end.

 _"What?"_ Kongo's much longer hair suddenly poofed up, making her look like the world's largest ripe dandelion. She tried to hold her hair down in vain for a half second then gave up and stared toward the ship's crew quarters. _"Wrench! What is this?"_

There was no response from Wrench.

I tapped Kongo's arm and pointed at a section of the side of the ship, where I could see a hazy glow around the copper rods that had just been installed.

The entire ship seemed to be humming. Dragon yelled over the com _"Wrench! this was not what we agreed to! I can't see any of this? Where are my control modules on whatever this is!"_

There was a mad cackle from Wrench. _"Your idea sucked. It's my damn ship. Fuck yer control modules. Keep watchin' if ya want, but if you do, you'll lose whatever antenna ya got lookin' f'r a way into my network in 'bout three seconds, and whatever's connected to it."_

 _Dragon is going to be very unhappy with Wrench after this._

 _If we live._

The glow around the copper rods on the ship's outer railing started quickly coalescing from a thick ring into a cone and climbing rapidly to the mast of the superstructure. There was a very large copper rod there that I hadn't seen before. I could barely see fine wires between the central rod and what looked like every smaller rod around the ship.

Suddenly, I was blind and deaf. A shockwave tore at my hair and clothes.

 _"Fubuki, Kongo, run now!"_ Wrench screamed.

Since I was blind in the visible light spectrum, I switched to radar mode and ran. I could see Kongo's radar behind me.

 _"What was that explosion, Wrench?"_ I asked over comms.

 _"That was a lightning bolt that would have made Zeus blush!"_ Wrench responded on the open channel.

That was when I noticed that even though I was deaf to all other noise, I could still, barely, hear Simurgh's song.

 _"She survived that and is still singing?"_

"Yes, but I bet she felt it!"

"I hope you're right. Keep hitting her, Wrench, we'll do what we can to keep her away from the ship."

 _"Dragon. Where are you?"_

"Right behind you, Fubuki."

I saw Dragon suddenly pop onto my radar. She was unlimbering something that looked like a rifle. _"You weren't there before."_

 _"Faraday field to protect myself from Wrench's EMP. It also grounds radar. Wrench is playing with some incredible current. She might even be matching or exceeding Legend's output."_

Kongo transmitted a whistle. _"Impressive. I've seen some footage of him fighting Endbringers. Can she do enough damage to chase Simurgh off?"_

 _"Only if Simurgh lets her, and not before the rest of the help arrives. Then we'll have five minutes to get Wrench and Imp out of her range. We can't get you three out of her range in that little time. Not if we can't teleport you. You're too massive."_

 _"I guess that means we have to defeat her in ten minutes or less after the rest of the team gets here?"_

Dragon sounded sad, and for some reason, it didn't feel like social fu. _"Yes, that's right."_

Kongo and I ran down the ramp at a sprint and jumped at the last moment, before we hit the water, summoning our rigs as we touched the waves.

 _"Hoppo here. I don't have aircraft, but shore batteries are now ready. Commencing ranging shots. Do not enter my line of sight."_ She punctuated her statement with the sound of battleship class rifles, firing at a rate that four battleships would be lucky to match. _"Over. Short. Over. Over. Short. Hit. Hit. Hit. Firing for effect, maximum rate of fire."_

My hearing was returning. The immense thunder of battleship guns rolled off Big Lug like a tide of sound. Despite the artificial thunder of guns, I could still hear Simurgh's song.

Torpedoes were useless against a flying target, so I didn't even load them.

Radar was showing Simurgh rock steady, immobile in the air. Small blips of hard contacts were falling off her, and it took me a second to realize what they were. Hoppo's shells. And they appeared to be having no effect at all. I limbered up my guns anyway.

 _"I'll go first on approach, Kongo."_

 _"Not yet, 'Buki. We wait for the others before we get close. Simurgh seems content to just sing, and we don't want to change that by charging."_ She paused. _"Unless it begins physically approaching Big Lug."_

Briefly, I stared at Kongo while I thought to myself. _She can see the future. At this range, it doesn't matter what we do, she's not even bothering to dodge Hoppo. Our firepower is an afterthought. Unless, possibly, we can get close enough to aim at vulnerable spots._

I considered ignoring Kongo's orders and charging, but decided not to. Simurgh might not kill me, and I didn't want to be alive after the battle if I disobeyed one of the most combat-experienced shipgirls I knew, who was also the best friend I had on this world.

Kongo and I opened fire almost simultaneously.

"Burning Love!" Announced the departure of a broadside of fourteen inch shells.

"Commencing Firing!" I yelled as my own guns started to speak.

A Kongo and I started engaging, the situation behind us was already changing.

 _"My shells are doing nothing. I'm going to try something different."_ Hoppo announced over the radio.

Wrench announced another firing of the lightning gun. _"Another bolt in three two one…"_

I closed my eyes. And was blinded anyway. And deaf again, except for Simurgh's song. I had a suspicion that I would hear her song even if I had no ears.

Radar showed Simurgh still unmoving. Motionless.

Then she fell towards the water about twenty meters and the singing stopped.

A moment after the singing stopped, an enraged screaming began. Louder than anything I'd ever heard before. I frantically covered my ears and it made no difference.

Dragon came in over the radio. _"What did you do, Hoppo?"_

Hoppo panted over the connection, obviously in severe pain. _"Simurgh isn't alive. She's a construct."_

There was a pause of about half a second. _"You're controlling Simurgh like you did my remote?"_

 _"No. I can interrupt her when she tries to sing, but anything else is too hard. It seems to be her most sensitive function. She's so absurdly complex and dense that your remote looks like prehistoric tools by comparison."_ Hoppo gasped in obvious pain again. _"No offense. I'll try to keep her from singing until the rest get-"_

Simurgh began to sing again.

There was a groan and heavy breathing before Hoppo spoke again. _"She did something. I can't even see the functions I was targeting before."_

 _"Not surprising. Resume firing if you don't have any other methods of attack. It's very difficult at this range to see the damage you are causing, but you are damaging her. My sensors are better than yours."_

Hoppo didn't respond, but a second later, her guns started to volley. Mine and Kongo's had never stopped. Not that it was doing any good.

It was pretty clear by her actions that Simurgh was just playing with us. She was a precog. If she was letting us hit her, it was because it didn't matter.

My mind wandered. _She'll reprogram us and then... Wait. What if-_

 _"Dragon!"_ I yelled on the com.

 _"Yes Fubuki?"_

 _"Thinkers have a hard time reading Kongo, Hoppo, and me, right?"_

 _"Yes."_

"Simurgh is a precog. That's a thinker, right?"

I fired another salvo, trying to aim at the largest wing I could see.

 _"Yes, precogs are thinkers."_ Dragon replied. _"Where are you going with this?"_

 _"What if Simurgh just wants us out of the world, so we don't mess with her thinker power?"_

 _"Hrm. That's possible, but there's no storm. You can't leave. Simurgh would have chased you into a storm if that's all-"_

I interrupted _"Hoppo, you power the dimensional portal from storms. Do you use lightning?"_

 _"What? Yes. Why are you asking-"_

 _"Firing in Three…"_

Hoppo sounded excited. _"Wait. That might-"_

 _"Two…"_

"Prepping."

Hoppo announced as Wrench continued counting down.

I grabbed Kongo's arm and frantically pointed at the ramp. _"Back to Big Lug!"_

 _"One…"_

Kongo did a quick double-take, then jumped back onto the ramp with me, clearly confused but following my lead.

Instead of being blinded by light, we were blinded by darkness. There was a very brief sensation of falling, and it started raining. Hard.

Big Lug was actually rolling slightly in the water. The first time I'd seen that other than when Hoppo came on board. But she seemed to be stabilizing.

 _"That was a very good idea, Fubuki. It worked."_ Hoppo sounded strangely upset, for someone congratulating me for a good idea.

Wrench's voice came over the radio, accompanied by the sound of frenzied typing. _"Where da fuck are we?"_

 _"We're on our homeworld, Wrench. I used your lightning generator to power a portal spell. The only problem being that we're not alone."_ Hoppo paused. _"I'm sorry. There are two controllers and two full Abyssal fleets surrounding us, closing in now. I can feel the presence of three more controllers and three more fleets less than half an hour distant. We don't stand a chance."_

 _"Lightning array fried. Don't got enough copper to repair it."_ Wrench sounded tired.

Kongo cracked her knuckles and spoke out loud. "Finally. A fight where I don't have to worry if I'm right or wrong."

I smiled and nodded, speaking out loud. "Agreed, Kongo." Then I realized I hadn't heard from Imp for a while, and switched back to radio comms. _"Imp, are you there?"_

Imp's voice came over the radio. _"Sure am. Not exactly happy to be here, but it's probably for the best. If Simurgh was trying to reprogram me, I could have killed a whole lot of people before someone stopped me. I don't even want to think about who Simurgh might have wanted me to get rid of."_

I hadn't even considered that Simurgh might have been after Imp, who was almost the perfect human assassin.

 _"Dragon, are you there?"_ I asked on the com. There was no answer

Kongo pointed to Dragon's remote laying underwater on the ramp, and we ran over to grab it and pull it out of the water. It seemed to be depowered, unresponsive.

 _"We found Dragon's remote, she seems dead-"_

 _"Remote is dead."_ Wrench broke in. _"She not on this world to control it."_

 _"Oh."_ Kongo and I spoke at the same time.

 _"I wish we'd been able to say goodbye."_ I complained.

 _"I'm sure she understands."_ Imp replied. _"We were in an 'Oh Shit' moment, in combat."_ I swore I could hear her shrug. _"Guess I get to see how well the martial arts I learned from my brother and Defiant's nanothorn blade work against Abyssals. Wrench. Start working on some sort of escape vehicle."_

 _"Fuck that. I'm putting together a mech. You want one too?"_

Imp chuckled. _"Sure. Why not? But if we live through this, remind me to take swimming lessons."_

* * *

Kongo and I floated slightly behind and to the side of Hoppo on the water at the ramp. Big Lug's hull could take an absurd amount of damage before it was breached, the World War 2 ordinance being used by the Abyssal fleets wouldn't even scratch her.

Abyssal controllers could break in through the hull, but they wouldn't try. Hoppo had already killed one controller, they would stay away from the ship until she was dead, or all five controllers were present. That was Kongo and Hoppo's best guess, anyway.

Kongo started with a little small talk before our last battle. "Fubuki, you realize that Big Lug is a warship now? That lightning generator had quite a punch."

I shook my head. "I hadn't thought about it, but you're right. If she sinks today, and if she ever returns to service, she's going to be one hell of a shipgirl. And we got to be crew."

Kongo's eyes got large. "We might get to be ship fairies together, with Wrench and Imp!"

"And Hoppo?"

Kongo's mouth opened, then closed. She looked at Hoppo. "I suppose so. An Island Princess Fairy? I can't even imagine that."

Hoppo turned slightly back towards us. "Neither can I. Especially not on a shipgirl." She snickered and turned back towards the ocean.

I looked out towards the open sea, and was able to pick out a few radar returns. The Abyssals were forming up for a charge on Hoppo. They would probably mostly ignore Kongo and I until the real threat was taken care of.

"Thank you for bringing us back. I'd rather die here than there." Kongo spoke, quietly, as we waited for the charge.

Hoppo grunted, then replied. "I'm not sure I would have if I'd thought about it for another few seconds. I don't think I'm living through this."

I hesitated. "You could just, well, go underwater and escape, or at least fight only the subs and controllers."

Orange eyes glowing in a tired, sad face turned back to face us. "No. I got you four into this. I'll get you out, or die trying."

Kongo and I looked at each other, then moved up, splitting our formation and settling ourselves one to each side in a line abreast formation.

"Let's give them something to remember us by." Kongo whispered as her guns tracked a target.

I prepared a full spread of torpedoes. The Abyssals in front of us were tightly packed. I would have several kills today before I died.

Hoppo's guns tracked multiple targets.

The Abyssals charged, and we began to fire.

Our weapons were impossibly powerful. I watched my five inch guns blow a hole clean through an Abyssal battleship's belt armor. Kongo and Hoppo's guns were obliterating everything they hit. Every salvo was a kill.

 _I must be dreaming._

When the remaining Abyssals fired on us. I watched the shells slow and then stop in midair, before reversing course and smashing through the Abyssals that fired them.

Kongo was staring at the sinking Abyssals as her main guns reloaded. "Hoppo. Did you do that?"

"No." Hoppo yelled.

All three of us stared at the carnage. Every Abyssal vessel that had charged us was sinking in front of our eyes, before we had even fired a second volley.

Hoppo rubbed her eyes, and looked again, then started twisting her head around nervously. "Where did they go?"

Kongo whispered "What just happened? Where did who go?"

"The two nearest controllers just moved. Up, into the air."

"Controllers can fly?" I squeaked before I coughed and pretended like there was something caught in my throat.

"No, they can't." Hoppo replied.

I heard the flapping of wings, and looked up, and barely kept from shrieking in fear.

Simurgh lowered itself to the water, directly in front of Hoppo, she was carrying two Abyssal controllers by the neck, one in each hand. They were tiny compared to the fifteen foot tall Endbringer.

All three of us stared as the Endbringer flexed it's hands. There were two loud snaps and four red eyes faded to darkness.

Simurgh chirped, sounding like a springtime songbird.

I whispered "If that wasn't a peace offering, I don't know what is."


	14. Chapter 14

**POV Dragon memories**

From nearly a kilometer in the air, my second local remote surveyed the battle. Simurgh was definitely acting out of character. Or at least out of any pattern I recognized.

As Kongo had mentioned, she was dropping items from her halo of machines. Every machine appeared to be different. Every one of them simply disappeared when it fell. I considered trying to retrieve one, but for me to do so, I'd have to risk a remote within a few meters of Simurgh to try to collect what might simply be a lure. The dropped items could be bombs, and the anti-teleportation device held in her ring of machines. Nothing was ever as it appeared with an Endbringer. Especially Simurgh.

The two remotes present were not combat remotes – all I was doing with the remotes was collecting data. But that was an important role.

Just thinking about how many tinkers had passed near Simurgh as she sat near Tattletale's facilities by the Brockton Bay portal hub made my processors redline. Teleport blocking was something new. Maybe from the same tinker that created Teacher's dimension isolating devices. We still didn't know what tinker made them, but we knew they had gone through at least one Brockton Bay portal and blocked it off.

Other than ending the teleport block, there didn't seem to be a way out of this for Fubuki, Kongo, or Hoppo. They were too slow to escape Simurgh, and too massive for a flying cape to carry them away. Even if the teleport block was lifted, Valkyrie might not be able to teleport the shipgirls due to their mass.

I looked down at the battle. Kongo had mentioned that she had felt a connection with Chevalier. Seeing them facing off against Simurgh, I had a better appreciation of what she might have meant. Chevalier had gone face-to-face with Behemoth, and the three girls were doing the same with Simurgh. Neither he nor they had any real hope of winning their battles. That didn't seem to be affecting their morale, other than to make them more determined.

Fubuki and Kongo were firing non-stop, and so was Hoppo. Their accuracy was amazing for such large projectile weaponry based on technology so old. Magical aiming shenanigans wouldn't matter in the end. If Simurgh was allowing them to hit her, then they couldn't hurt her enough to matter.

I sent a private radio message to Wrench. "If you can increase power to-"

"Can't. Generator overloading now. Big Lug'll blow in ten minutes or so."

"We're going to get you and Imp out of here before then, Wrench."

There was a pause. "Fubuki and Kongo?"

"They are too slow and too massive to carry. If we can't disable the teleport disruption-"

"You going to leave them here?"

"Kongo masses almost thirty-eight million kilos, Wrench-"

A second later, Wrench replied with a tired voice. "Not going. Owe 'em too much. If we can't scare off Simurgh, I'll give 'em a clean death. Hoppo too. Generator overload will-"

"We need you, Wrench."

"They saved me, Dragon. Their crews gave me the mental kick in the ass I needed."

"This world needs you-"

"Dis world don' give a rat's ass if I live, Dragon. Dey jus' want what I can do, not me. I ain't stupid."

"There are people who care about you." I replied, trying to bring Wrench back around.

Wrench wasn't being convinced of anything, she got very loud, almost yelling. "Two of 'em 'r right here, Dragon. Goin' down with the ship and taking them with me if we don't drive off Simurgh. Unless you want Hoppo to take th' shipgirls back to their home world with Simurgh Surprise in dere heads? Dose shipgirls trust each other a hundred percent. They don't get what Simurgh can make them do, not really. We quarantine them, all Hoppo needs is a storm to get away, and she even more nutty den me. Chevalier will kill 'em."

Wrench was clearly set on her path, and I wasn't sure if she was wrong.

A moment later, Wrench twisted the knife. "If we ain't able to get away, I kill 'em clean. I think you is human enough you have a hard time livin' with yourself if you got to pull the trigger on th' girls when they think they won an' Simurgh flies away?"

All of my processing power, and I had no good answer to that.

After a few seconds of silence, Wrench spoke again. "Din't think so. Now, get offa my radio 'less you got a way to save us all. Even Hoppo. I gots ta concentrate. Another shot coming up. Gotta do repairs on the fly too. You c'n collect Imp when it time. I split us up, so she can't konk me, don't ask her."

Hoppo suddenly stopped firing her guns and indicated she was trying something else. That was followed by Simurgh screaming. A sound I'd never heard before. The sound stunned both shipgirls for a second before they resumed firing. Hoppo was still standing on the pedestal in the middle of her island, but her hands were gripping her head. She was standing hunched with her knees bent, and her back arched downwards far enough that her head was nearly touching her knees.

Despite her obvious pain, Hoppo claimed on the radio that she was able to exert just enough control over Simurgh's to interfere with singing. For about fifteen seconds. Then Hoppo said Simurgh changed something.

Simurgh started singing again. I got Hoppo to resume firing her guns, and Wrench was counting down for her third shot when I detected the energy emission from Simurgh.

* * *

**POV Dragon Interview**

"I could just read the rest of this, but I'd prefer to hear it. Teleportation again, or was there something else?" Chevalier asked.

"Teleportation. She transposed herself and my remote. And then the ship and Simurgh teleported with everyone present. Even one of my remotes."

"That's it? She just transposed the two of you?"

"As far as I can tell, Simurgh didn't teleport Big Lug. Radio chatter clearly indicated that Hoppo did it, using Big Lug's lightning generator weapon for power. I couldn't detect any residual teleport signature from Big Lug, but I did detect Simurgh's teleport."

Chevalier rested his right hand's finger knuckles against his forehead and used the thumb of the same hand to knead his temple. "So what's the final assessment?"

"As best as we can figure, Simurgh set everything up so she could be teleported to somewhere we can't follow."

"Where we can't prevent her from cloning Eidolon." Chevalier muttered.

I nodded. "That said, Khonsu, Tohu, and Bohu are apparently beginning to degrade."

Chevalier's hand left his forehead and he tilted his head. "Dragon, are you insinuating that Simurgh killed them before she left?"

"If a cape did it, I'd think they would have bragged by now. Simurgh modified Leviathan before Golden Morning, and it didn't look pleasant, but Leviathan never attacked her for it. It's plausible that Simurgh was controlling them-"

"And when Simurgh left, the other three collapsed like cut-string marionettes." Chevalier completed the statement.

"That seems to be the best-fit solution, with the evidence we have."

Chevalier pushed back his chair and turned towards the window nearest his desk. "But why do it that way? Why not just… never mind. Magic. Hoppo claimed it was magic. The short version seems to be that Simurgh caught a cab to a magical girl dimension that sounds like it might be nearly as grim as ours was on Golden Morning." He shook his head and continued staring out the window. "Dragon, is there a word for being irritated with yourself because you are happy that your problems are now someone else's problems?"

"I don't think so, Chevalier."

* * *

**POV Fubuki debriefing**

I stood at attention in front of the hospital bed and waited for the man in it to give me permission to speak.

"Report, Fubuki."

"Admiral, have you read my written report?"

"I was only able to peruse it before the pain medicines kicked in."

I looked at Kongo, sitting next to the Admiral's bed. She was blushing furiously. We were fortunate that the Admiral had learned years ago to keep his office on the first floor. "Understood. Highlights, or details?"

"Highlights. Details if I ask for them. I've already gotten Kongo's account."

"Yes, sir."

"It started when I escorted Kongo out on a test run after her boilers had been serviced"

...

"The man was apparently what that world called a cape. He could turn into a dragon. Kongo was forced to beat him into submission."

...

"No, sir, the woman didn't turn into a Dragon, that was just her name. She was a machine."

...

"I'm sorry I made your head hurt, sir. Yes, sir. As far as I know she was actually a machine. A computer. Like a radar array that could think for itself. Yes, sir, it boggles the mind. We have one of her remotes, but I would like to honor it, not dissect it. Wrench can help us with technology without desecrating Dragon's body."

...

"Yes, the woman that saved me after my foolish actions on the side of the cargo vessel was Wrench. Yes, sir. The same Wrench that built the ship we arrived in."

...

"Sir, on that world, some of our crews were still alive, but very old. The youngest was in his early nineties. Events on that world and ours seemed to match until shortly after World War II."

...

I'm sorry, sir. I have a lot of powerful, emotional memories of that meeting with my crew. I'm ready to continue.

...

"We can see Imp just fine, sir. She's Wrench's bodyguard, but she's weak compared to any Abyssal, so it would probably be best to have at least a couple escorts attached to Wrench as well, at all times."

...

"No, she's not just a rude, bragging American. She really can rebuild islands. It only took her a couple months to build Big Lug, entirely by herself. The images she showed Nagato of the Panamanian construction sites and timeframes are accurate. Yes, she's already started arguing with everyone over at the docks about rig upgrades." I couldn't help but smile a little. "After she beat her head against the wall trying to figure out how repair buckets work."

...

"Yes, sir, I believe that she has a great deal to offer, but we have to use technology carefully because we now know part of why humans fared so poorly against Abyssal assaults."

...

"It seems fantastic, but Hoppo is here, not at her island. She has been well-behaved, but can get a little unhinged when the conversation turns to her time as an Island Princess, or if she thinks someone is trying to control her. She brought us home, but she needs a very careful guiding hand if we want to try to work with her."

...

"Yes, she also brought Simurgh with us. We aren't quite sure how that happened. Hoppo is confident that she only brought a sphere of that world large enough for Big Lug, and Simurgh was two kilometers from Big Lug when the portal was activated. However she got here, she's apparently content to follow Hoppo around."

...

"She's unimaginably tough, sir. Literally, we really cannot imagine how tough she is. The five of us didn't win that battle against five fleets and five controllers. Simurgh did. Anything that threatened us died. After she brought us the first two dead controllers, which Hoppo then drained of their essence, she made it clear that she wasn't aggressive towards us." I paused. "At least for now."

...

"No, sir, she never did harm any of us, but she doesn't talk. We think she just did what she had to do to force us to teleport to this world, so she could get away from that world."

...

"I don't know, sir. We were advised that Simurgh had been trying to clone a cape named Eidolon, because she had some sort of duty towards him, to make him stronger. Dragon and the other capes were preventing her from raising him. Wrench thinks that Simurgh might have given up on cloning Eidolon and attached herself to Hoppo instead. With Simurgh backing her, Hoppo can easily obliterate the Abyssal presence on our world."

...

"Yes, I had considered that. Hoppo said that after the Abyssals on our world are dead and she leaves, shipgirls will disappear. We don't know that it's true, but it may not be false. She also says the Abyssal presence in this world is anemic, compared to some others. This world has only been under siege for a few decades. Some worlds have been host to Abyssal infections for much longer."

* * *

**POV Hoppo

I looked at Nagato, Mutsu, and the Admiral, but kept my eyes on the Admiral. "Admiral, I now have the memories of six controllers. Nearly five thousand years of experience across dozens of worlds. In all of their memories, Abyssals have always won in the end. They are not an 'enemy' like you try to perceive them to be. Think of them as a terminal disease. This world will grow sicker and more war torn until it can no longer support life, and all the magical energy is drained by Abyssal growth. Then the Abyssals will leave, entering dozen of new dimensions, and any shipgirls remaining will cease to exist."

Nagato spoke. "Do you have any guesses or institutional knowledge that wasn't direct experience indicating what happens if we defeat the Abyssals and then leave, but this world is not lifeless?"

I carefully avoided antagonizing Nagato, and kept my thoughts to myself. _We? You cannot defeat them. Not permanently. Not even Simurgh can do that, I don't think, though she can kill them and allow me to consume their essence so they stay dead._

"No, that's something new. The only thing making this possible is Simurgh."

The admiral stared at me, and I met his eyes. I was frankly amazed that he and the other shipgirls allowed me into the room with him. Especially after Kongo had put him in the hospital after literally tackling him through the first floor window of his office. He wasn't very mobile with all the bandages and the cast on his leg.

After a moment, I lowered my eyes. I didn't need to dominate him. We were not enemies.

"You have no memory of another Abyssal like you, with all the memories you have taken from the other controllers?" This time the admiral spoke.

I paused. "There have been rebellious Abyssals. Even some much like me who successfully escaped, but they were typically broken, animalistic, and barely human after what had been done to them."

"Typically. What about the atypical ones that were more like you?"

"The few who were like me were killed, much as I would have been killed here, by massed Abyssal forces. Simurgh prevented that end. She saved me, and all of us."

Wrench muttered "She trick us to come here in da first place."

Outside the window, Simurgh was hovering, looking out over the ocean. She tended to follow me around. It was unnerving at first. She had not sung since she attacked us and tricked us to teleport with her to this new world. She did hum sometimes, or chirp, but it was rare, typically only to draw attention to something, and always directed at me.

Wrench and Imp were scared of her. Most of the shipgirls gave her a wide berth. Gave us a wide berth. I could tell that some of them were more afraid of me than Simurgh, which was laughable, if only they knew.

I felt safe with Simurgh, but she wasn't a friend. She was like a giant zero to me. A zero that really protected me. A protector that was stronger than me. She was my attendant fleet.

Simurgh was all of those things, but in the end, Simurgh was only a machine, not a person like Dragon. A fantastically complex machine, but still a machine. It had killed millions and created untold misery, but it had done so because that was what it was told to do. Why it chose me as it's new master, I didn't know.

 _But I know what monsters are._


	15. Chapter 15

**One Year Later - POV Fubuki

"Do you miss your world, Imp, Wrench?"

Imp stared out the window as she stirred her ice cream. "Yes, and no." She sighed. "I had friends there that I miss. Friends that I knew I could trust, and who trusted me. It's very hard to leave that behind."

Wrench's mouth tightened. "No. I don't. Too many bad memories. If you're going to continue talking about it so I can hear it, I'll leave you to the conversation."

 _A vast improvement over the old Wrench. Not even a single curse word, and understandable grammar too._

Imp looked at Wrench for a moment, then shrugged and grinned at me. "She can't hear me now. I miss my old world, and I miss my friends there, but despite my friends there, I was lonely because of my power. Here, there are hundreds of people across the world who can see me. I've even been able to attend school again with the destroyers, without giving myself fits trying to juggle my power so that teachers don't forget about me when I'm concentrating on schoolwork."

I nodded. Imp had grown a lot, though nowhere near as much as Wrench, and they had both thrown all their effort into helping us. Both of them been shocked when we arranged to show them what Abyssals had done to human coastal cities and communities on our Earth. Scion had been capable of far more destruction than the Abyssals, and killed trillions, but he hadn't used that potential on one world.

The Abyssals were very industrious and thorough about their destruction. Entire cities were nothing more than low piles of rubble. Any coastal areas outside of cities that looked like they might be a place where people could live or grow food were dead and barren, the earth burned and salted.

Human communities on this world did not exist within a hundred kilometers of water over a hundred meters deep. There were prospectors for old tech, outlaws, and desperate people who lived closer to deep water, but we found evidence of their deaths on patrols fairly frequently. Only shipgirl facilities were near the water, and they were staffed with very few humans. Humans did provide us with supplies, but those supplies were generally airdropped directly on base or to prearranged locations where we would collect them.

Wrench and Imp had each responded in their own way when they saw the state of humanity in our world. Wrench added a second zero point generator to Big Lug, and improved the lightning generator to the point where it could obliterate Abyssal cruisers with a single shot at up to line of sight. Big Lug's lack of long range attacks was not critical. Hoppo tended to accompany Wrench on supply runs, supplying long range gunfire, and air support. When she didn't, we sent a task group.

Hoppo also built several airfields and dozens of huge warehouses on the cargo dirt of Big Lug. Human supply aircraft could land, trans-ship cargo, and then take off. Even the largest cargo aircraft could take off with moderate loads.

Imp tried to go to a naval academy, but failed the entrance exams and was required to go back to school. She joined the destroyers in their school on base, and brought some of that education with her back to Wrench.

"You know, you don't have to go with us, if you want to stay here and live." I offered.

Imp and Wrench both looked at each other than back at me.

"The Admiral put you up to this, Fubuki?" Wrench asked.

"Sounds like it. He was trying to convince me to try to qualify for naval academy classes again." Imp looked at Wrench.

"Imp, you would make an excellent Admiral." I tried to sound encouraging. It didn't think it worked. Imp's power was a serious command handicap.

"In a navy of humans? Who can't see me unless I think about it?" Imp scowled in irritation. "I wanted to be a human/shipgirl liaison officer, not a human navy officer. People just don't understand how hard it is for me to interact with humans. I want to stay with you because my power doesn't make me an outsider. Not only that, you might need me. Humans aren't always reasonable, and I can get in and out of places none of you can."

Wrench waited for Imp to finish, anger, irritation, and then understanding crossing her face. "Don't try to protect me. Abyssals are as bad as the S9, and Big Lug will be a huge benefit for your logistics and tactics. I'm going with you no matter how dangerous it is. End of discussion."

"Haha! I told the admiral they would come with us!" Kongo popped her head out from around the corner where she had been hiding with Hoppo. I had seen and heard them when they arrived. Fast Battleships were not quiet or unobtrusive, even if Hoppo could be uncannily sneaky for someone as massive as a small island.

Hoppo came out of hiding as well, grinning, but nowhere near as intense as Kongo. Fortunately, Simurgh was nowhere in sight. It was probably sitting over Big Lug again, a few miles out at sea.

I could have sworn I saw a quick smile on Wrench's face when Hoppo popped out from around the corner looking happy, but I was probably imagining it. "Well, if you're coming with us, the Admiral asked me to pass on the message that you are welcome to show up tomorrow at 0700 for preliminary invasion planning."

* * *

**POV Simurgh

 _The new primary is growing more mentally mature and capable. It is impossible to quantify exactly how, due to the primary being almost entirely unreadable, but there is a great deal of indirect evidence of increased confidence and self-control._

 _There are no more enemies of the primary on this world. Based on the data gathered from the readable and partially readable individuals in proximity to the Primary, travel to the next world will occur in less than a week. The next world will contain more and more powerful enemies, which would be ideal._

 _The primary requires stronger enemies to grow to their best potential._


End file.
